


Driftwood

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Assorted Short Fic, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-09 15:53:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 21,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5545940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miscellaneous prompts, fills, memes, and other assorted Dragon Age vignettes.</p><p>Mostly Fenris/Male Hawke and Dorian/Trevelyan, with other characters tossed in the mix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Leaf (Male Trevelyan/Dorian Pavus)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dorian and the Inquisitor land themselves in a predicament at the Winter Palace.

Despite the scented candles burning around the Winter Palace gardens, the air still teemed with mosquitoes.

“They breed in clouds down in the marshes, dear,” said a comtesse beside Dorian, fanning herself with one hand and sipping a glass of wine under her mask with the other. “I keep telling Her Grace to raze them with fire, but apparently a rare moss grows that is imperative—”

Dorian hummed. He supposed he should be flattered anyone was talking to him this evening. The curious and the bold had already traded their flourishes, and now only the dull and indifferent drifted his way, as desperate for company as he was to be done with this whole dreary affair.

Out of the corner of his eye, Trevelyan dangled off a garden trellis and landed with a thump in the bushes.

“Pardon me, madame. I have a buzzing insect to attend to.”

Dorian ducked behind a garden hedge, then doubled back down a stone path to the secluded little corner of courtyard where Trevelyan was still struggling to lift himself out of the roses.

“You couldn’t be a little discreet?” Dorian cursed under his breath. Of course not. The man who plummeted out of the Fade did not know the meaning of the word. He grabbed Trevelyan's hands and hauled. The Inquisitor came hissing and spitting like a cat out of the thorns, followed by—

An unmistakable rip.

Trevelyan spun around. A sovereign sized tear flapped open right over his left arsecheek.

“I don’t suppose you carry a needle and thread, do you?” he asked.

Dorian could only force his eyebrows so high.

“Right….well.”

For the first time that evening, the Inquisitor seemed at a complete loss. It was surprisingly unnerving.

“I would think Josephine keeps one in her belt. For emergencies,” said Dorian had last.

“Go find her then,” said Trevelyan, already sneaking away through the shadows. “I'll be in the servant's closet in the fuma-fumi- _tch_. Smoking parlor.”

Dorian sighed. Ten minutes later he returned with Josephine through the brown stinging haze of the _fumeur_. Sure enough, he opened a servant's closet door to find…

Trevelyan, Varric, Sera, and Blackwall, all seated on barrels around a cluster of melted candles on a card table.

“All of you are in here?!” hissed Josephine, slightly hysterical. She snapped the closet door behind her, nipping Dorian’s ass in the process as he squeezed in behind her. “Show me.”

Trevelyan stood up and showed her the tear.

Josephine let out a colorful string of Antivan and unbuttoned a pouch on her belt. “We should send a runner back to the caravan—”

“No time,” said Trevelyan. “And they’d be intercepted anyway. What are the odds of anyone noticing?”

“ _High_ ,” said Josephine. “If it had been anywhere else….” She sighed and rubbed her brow. “We will simply have to arrange your coat over it. Take off your pants.”

Dorian felt his face heat, but Trevelyan was already unthreading his belt. He sat down and tugged off his boots, giving Sera a wink before he skinned off his tight, calfskin trousers. The hair on his bare legs sprang up in static.

And so the six of them sat cramped and crowded together like a farcical tableau, the Herald of Andraste perched cross-legged, scratching his fingernails up and down his bare thighs like a happy dog while his diplomatic adviser stitched.

“Well well….” Varric reached into one of the open barrels. He pulled out a bottle of _Vigne Jaune_. “Someone had a secret stash—hey!”

Josephine plucked it out of his hands and set it on the floor. “Most likely poisoned.”

“Spoiled sport.”

“This is always how I imagined my stay at the Winter Palace,” sighed Dorian wistfully. “Stuffed in a closet with sweaty, half-naked—”

“I will kick you if you put me in there,” said Sera, popping the cork on the _Vigne_.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, my dear.” Dorian took the bottle from her hand before Josephine could grab it and took a sip. A poor year. “Or _you_ for that matter.”

“Thank the Maker,” said Blackwall.

Dorian wiped his mustache and turned his attention to Trevelyan, whose twisted smile was a mite too giddy.

“You seem pleased,” he said. “Have we achieved some deep dark Herald’s secret fantasy of being locked pantsless in a servant's corner?”

“Nothing, it’s….” Trevelyan’s smile got the better of him. “I always wanted to do stuff like this when I was a kid. Secret missions, sneaking around....I just never had the friends.”

Josephine lowered her needle and stared. Every single person in that closet shifted in embarrassment. Trevelyan, poor lonely Trevelyan, who had been thrown away by all that should have loved and protected him, who incinerated Templars off with a glee that bordered on worrying, could be pathetically honest when he wanted to.

“Inquisitor,” said Josephine. “Focus.”

“I am,” he said, all humor vanishing. “Hurry along, will you?”

Josephine took a shuddering breath and kept sewing. Dorian passed the wine to Sera, who polished it off with an impressive burp. When Josephine was done, Trevelyan pulled on the breeches and stood patiently while she tucked his coat tails carefully over the white seam.

“Thanks mother,” said Trevelyan, gathering his boots.

“Do try to not fall into any more thorn bushes.” She flashed a glare at Dorian.

“I didn’t put him there!”

“I’m sure. Inquisitor, please return to the ballroom posthaste, before the bell strikes.”

They filed out one by one, until just Dorian and Trevelyan were left. Trevelyan started past him, until Dorian caught him by the arm and straightened his collar, plucking a prickly leaf stuck under his lapel.

“The bell’s about to ring,” said Trevelyan.

“I know.” Dorian kissed him, deep and to the point, and stepped back before the wine gave him other ideas. “You did too sneak around with your idiot friends as a child.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Trevelyan, his eyes already flattening into that polite, practiced mask of Inquisitorial blankness. “I never had a real friend before you.” He turned the doorknob, a pinch at the corner of his mouth. “The ones I had would have left me in the thorn bushes.”

Dorian sighed as the door shut behind him, leaning on a barrel to compose himself. The only person in the world who would have pulled him out of the bushes as a boy was poor dead Felix.

He twirled the prickly leaf by its stem, taking in the comfortable little closet where he had conspired with five people he had, dangerously, begun to suspect were his friends. Drinking. Rolling eyes. Investigating an imperial coup.

He started to flick the leaf away, then paused, and tucked it inside his belt pouch instead. If he died tonight, let the looters of his corpse try to suss the meaning out of that one. They’d be wrong, either way. Dorian wasn’t quite sure himself, only that, for once, this was a memory he’d like to keep.


	2. Warmth (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two days after his reconciliation with Fenris, doubt catches up with Hawke. 
> 
> nsfw

Garrett Hawke had a schedule.

In his entire tenure in Kirkwall, he had strayed from it exactly twice: the day of his mother's funeral, and the month after the Arishok skewered him through the lower intestine with a broad axe. Adjusted for travel and inconvenience, all other days followed a pattern hammered into his heart by decades of vicious discipline and focused self-loathing:

Rise at dawn. Warm up. Breakfast. Drill for two hours. Cool down. Second set. Cool down. Correspondence and tea.

Only then were guests permitted, and only then could the day proper begin.

Until today.

A stripe of sunlight crawled up the wall into the spiderwebs mapped across the ceiling of Danarius' mansion. Hawke hadn't gotten out of bed in two days.

 _Well, that's not entirely true,_  he thought, as Fenris' breath warmed the skin of his neck. He had risen once to stir the coals, more than once to use the privy, and a few times to bring chunks of hard loaf and cheese back to bed.

Each time pulled into the sheets by a touch on the wrist, or a kiss.

Hawke swallowed. His arms tightened around the warm body pressed against him. It had been a long time since he held someone. Since he'd held _him_.

And yet...

He steadied his breathing against the pounding of his heart. The reckless waste of the last few days chewed at the bottom of his throat like acid.

This wasn't right. Not when Kirkwall teetered on a knife's edge. Not when barely a day passed without someone begging at the Champion's door for him to save a loved one or a livelihood. It was hard to remember a time when he didn't wake gasping in the night, one foot on the floor as he fled in terror trying to remember what he'd forgotten, what he'd missed, what tiny clue or artifact might save  _someone_ -

It was his fault. He'd made himself responsible.

And now he lay abed at noon.

 _Dog probably thinks I've abandoned him,_  he thought. Andraste, he didn't even want to imagine the stack of letters waiting for him on his desk.

Letters.

His fingers traced down the scarred skin of Fenris' back. He was really thinking of letters right now.

Ridiculously, tears sprang to his eyes. It wasn't fair. He should be able to enjoy this. He was finally,  _finally_  in the arms of the man he loved, and all he could think about was how many bloody Solstice party invitations he had to answer. The tedious, backbreaking routine he'd drilled into himself had twisted him. He couldn't remember how to relax.

 _Enough._  He'd dallied too long already. There were people waiting for him. Servants who needed direction and friends who might need his help. While he was dozing, Meredith could have burned the Circle down. He could just imagine his sister weeping saintly tears, wondering why her big brother didn't come....and probably figuring out very quickly he was busy coming for someone else.

_Right. Getting up now._

As if he heard the thought, Fenris snuggled closer.

Hawke sighed. "Fen-"

"Shhhhh."

There is a very high likelihood Bodahn has sent out a search party by now," said Hawke, only half-joking.

"I was under the impression your servants simply stood around the mansion awaiting your return," murmured Fenris.

"More like sample my wine cellar."

Fenris shifted so that his leg dragged against the inside of Hawke's thigh. It was so tempting to lie here like this, to uncoil the rusted wire that had cut into his heart for years and let it slide off soundlessly into pleasure....

_Man up, damn you._

"In all seriousness...." started Hawke again. "I really do have to go."

A mouse gnawed at a support somewhere deep within the wall. Fenris propped himself up on an elbow.

"With every intention of returning, I hope," he said, a little crease forming at the corner of his eyes.

"Of course. I can even come back tonight, if you'd like." What in the Void was he saying? "It's just...."

Maker, he couldn't help himself. His hands wanted so badly, after so long alone, to  _touch._  He pressed his thumb along Fenris' cheekbone and cupped his face, almost sick with sudden longing to shape his lips against the scar under his left eye.

Fenris sighed into the touch. "If you're busy, it is no trouble-"

"No! No, I mean..." Something was buzzing inside him. He was like a tuning fork that had been struck on a table's edge and now quivered in helpless anxiety. "I can put aside whatever business...."

Could he, though? It was only a matter of time until something dragged him away. The Templars or the Carta or some blasted Qunari redhead--it didn't matter. He was Champion, Kirkwall's  _first_  Champion, and that meant his life was no longer his own.

It must have shown on his face.

"You are worried your obligations will get in the way of....." Fenris scratched his fingernails on the bedspread.

"That's one way of putting it," said Hawke, and reminded himself to stop underestimating his favorite elf. "Believe me, if I could stay here for the rest of the day, I would." 

A faint blush colored Fenris' pointed ears. He turned his attention to the green shadows shifting over the floor from the juniper tree in the garden. It was still the cool hours of the morning, and Hawke could feel the warm press of his stomach against his side as he breathed.

"Might I make an observation?" said Fenris, and waited for Hawke's nod. "You place too much importance on yourself."

"I'm the Champion."

"You are but one man."

"You say that like it doesn't matter. Like it's not important." 

"It _is_ important," said Fenris, placing a hand on his chest and spreading his fingers through his chest hair. "But you can't be everywhere." 

"That doesn't change my responsibilities or make them go away. Even if I wanted to...." He struggled. "That wouldn't be me." 

"Carrying a burden to the point of breaking aids no one."

"It's not as simple as that."

"No?" Fenris snorted. "Will the city collapse into the sea without you?"

"Not if the Qunari re-invade first," muttered Hawke, then gasped as Fenris tugged a chest hair sharply.

"There are hundreds of blades in this city." Fenris brushing his knuckles down his stomach. "Yours needn't be among them today."

"And tomorrow?" Hawke whimpered as Fenris gripped his cock. "You're ah.....not really playing fair."

Fenris sighed and reluctantly released him. "Then go, be who you are."

Hawke could taste the sullen hurt in the air between them, and the thousand fears that lay beyond this bed.

"I will not tell you what to do," said Fenris, in that practiced level voice of his. "But neither will I pretend that the way you live your life isn't baffling to everyone but you." 

"I never thought I'd hear you tell anyone to lighten up."

"You asked my opinion, and I gave it." Fenris turned down the covers. "Are you leaving?"

Was he? Hawke's eyes smarted. Was this really the cost of being Champion? Not being able to have a single good thing for himself? Even on a small scale such as this....perhaps that had always been his problem. The fear of _what-if_ crushed him no matter where he was, no matter where he turned. 

And if he stayed here?

He'd be afraid....but he'd be afraid with Fenris. 

The list of horrible calamities waiting just outside the door reached a deafening pitch inside his head, then slowly faded away. 

"I suppose...." he said, pulling the covers back up. "We'll hear the screams if anything happens?"

Fenris studied him for a long moment, then lunged forth and kissed him.

Their teeth clacked together. Fenris gripped his ear to hold him still, bruising and warming their lips against each other until the rest of their bodies followed suit.

"I have no objections," said Fenris.

"Yes, well..." Hawke was having a hard time forming words. "I suppose the people do owe me a few...somethings.."

"They can have their Champion back-" growled Fenris with his teeth in his throat. "When I'm done with him."

Hawke whimpered. Fenris was sitting in his lap, solid and unmovable as a boulder. It didn't matter if Hawke wanted to get up now; he had a feeling he couldn't have made his muscles respond even if he tried--not with Fenris reaching between them and gripping the sticky heads of their arousal together until they were both reeling and gone.

In the tangle, Fenris ended up between his legs. He drew back from their kiss, pupils blown and  _hungry._  Hawke could sense how badly he wanted this, the instinct quivering in his muscles.....but he waited, and let the question hang between them.

Hawke let his head fall back on the pillow. He hadn't done that particular act in years, not since the teary-eyed tumbles in the woods as a boy. There were traps inside him that he didn't understand, didn't think he could explain even if he wanted to, but he feared, more than anything, a humiliation in the act that would strip everything he had away and leave him as he truly was: not a Champion, just a sad, fat farm boy from Lothering who'd been used roughly all his life.

But then Fenris leaned down and kissed his cheek. It snapped a chain inside him painlessly, and he nodded and rolled over. Hawke parted his ankles in the sheets and buried his face in the goose down pillow.

He trusted Fenris. In this bed he wasn't the Champion or Serah Hawke. He was just a man, with his lover who had suffered enough humiliation of his own to never wish it on anyone. Fenris would not let him fall.

He was, however, going to do most of the work.

_If I'm going to be worthless I might as well go the whole way._

To his credit, Fenris seemed to decide what they both needed was to take things slow. He hung over Hawke's exposed back, drinking him in, then slowly lower himself. The spark of warm skin and cool air made Hawke gasp and buck, which made Fenris moan and press harder, a sigh that might have been held all his life draining out of his lips.

They lay like that for a long time, writhing against each other, Fenris kissing the back of his neck and wrapping his arms around his chest. Hawke wondered how long he had wanted this, dreamed of being crushed against him without any real hope of it coming true. The thought was enough to make his eyes smart again and bury his face back in the pillow.

It didn't take long for Fenris' grinding against him to take on a more urgent friction. He hissed off as if from a hot stove, sitting back on his folded legs and squeezing the base of his cock, one hand on Hawke's clammy thigh to steady himself.

"I think I'm starting to doze off," said Hawke, boneless in the sheets. The remark earned him a chuckle and a swat on his arse.

"Don't you dare," said Fenris, and reached for the bottle under the bed.

From there it was all about falling apart. Fenris took his time, enjoying the creaking little whimpers he teased out of his lover. It was so gradual, so soothing, that Hawke felt himself actually sliding back down into sleep. It was the sting of Fenris squeezing his balls that snapped him awake, and after that he dared not drift off again.

It wasn't long before he felt Fenris settle against his raised ass, fists knotting in the sheets on either side of his chest. A quick string of kisses down Hawke's back raised the hair on his neck.

Hawke tried to steady his breathing. He had no clue if Fenris knew what he was doing. This could turn very unpleasant very quick. He felt the mattress dip as Fenris shifted himself, spreading Hawke's arse with a thumb, drawing out the moment for his own pleasure.

Then he pushed in.

Hawke hissed, twitching his knees up at the shock of pain and fullness. Fenris exhaled explosively against his back, as if he'd been suffocating for three years and only now remembered how to breathe. The mattress quivered under his trembling arms.

"Take your time," grunted Hawke into the pillow. "Dammit."

With what felt like monstrous restraint, Fenris eased himself in and stayed there suspended over Hawke's back, his chest huffing and deflating as if he'd just run the steps from Low Town. He pressed his hips forward, and Hawke groaned. Fenris pressed again, harder, and Hawke rolled his hips back, arcing his back in a way he hoped communicated, yes dammit, you won, now have your way with me. Fenris must have taken the cue, because within seconds the only sound was the furious slap of flesh coupled with Hawke's cries skirling higher and higher in the embarrassing echoes of the mansion.

It didn't take long. After three years, neither of them had the stamina for that.

 _Damned good thing Fenris doesn't have any neighbors,_ Hawke thought, as he came with an undignified sob.

His release still shuddering through him, Fenris splayed his hands at the small of his back and began fucking him in earnest. His dignity didn't fare much better. His breath tightened to a whistle between his clenched teeth, nevermind the spoonful of warm spit that landed right between Hawke's shoulder blades after what must have been a full minute of slack jaw thrusting. When he came it was with a snap of his hips so hard it rocked Hawke forward and bonked his skull into the headboard. A moment later Hawke's back was covered in moist, panting elf. Delightful. 

The silence after that was like a stilled tuning fork. A barn swallow _tuh-weeted_ in the courtyard tree. Fenris stayed clutched to Hawke's sweaty back like an overgrown sloth, his soft cock still buried inside him, breath warm and ragged on Hawke's skin.

Their eyes opened at the same time. A moist little click.

Two hummingbirds sparred at the throat of a trumpet flower growing on a vine around the courtyard window. They thrust and parried, flashing like bright, jeweled knives.

"Those migrate from Antiva," murmured Fenris, into the damp hair of Hawke's neck.

"Hmmmm?" Hawke was too tired to move. Or to care that Fenris' cock was starting to grow uncomfortable inside him. "How do you know?"

"I read it," said Fenris, with something so grateful, so trembling, that Hawke couldn't imagine why he had ever thought of leaving. "Would....you like me to read it to you?"

"Hmmmm," said Hawke again.

Later, as the sun went down on the third, (third!) day, Hawke curled himself against Fenris's chest, and let the last ropes that held his mind to shore unmoor and drift soundlessly into water. They both agreed they should probably both get out tomorrow.

Maybe walk the whole two city blocks to Hawke's bed.


	3. For The Sake Of Your Good Grace (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winter is harsh in Kirkwall, especially when your boyfriend won't talk to you. Act II.

Hawke was halfway across Hightown market when he noticed the body.

Two guards and a crowd of merchants huddled under an archway, whispering as a tarp was pulled over a dark shape in the snow.

Hawke stroked his mabari's ears. The sun was cresting the hills outside Kirkwall, its first rays setting a steady drip drip drip at every corner of the market. Recognizing the woman who sold him chestnuts, Hawke crunched his way through the snow to her side.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Tch. Dunover found himself a bad headache." She chewed a blackened cuticle. "Icicle."

The snow under the archway was spattered pink. A hand stuck out from under the tarp, a pale band around its ring finger. The guard standing over the body started to drop something into his pocket, met Hawke's eye, then dropped it in anyway.

"That must have been one bear of a...." Hawke shifted his attention to the archway high above the stall. Fangs of ice, sharp as swords, lined the lip of the stone. It would only take one falling to split a skull in two.

"I kept telling him." She spat in the snow. "Nothing to fuck around with, but nooooo, he wanted to stand in the shade on account of the sun shitting in his eyes. Couldn't catch the lifters if he was blinking with a hand in front of his face." She shuffled back to her stall. "Won't be blinking now."

 _No_ , thought Hawke, turning to make his way to Hightown Square. _You're safe on that bet._

~

Every dawn, Hawke walked his dog down the silent streets of the city to clear his head. Today though--huffing up the last few steps into the deserted square--he paused and took in his own doorway.

Bodahn and Sandal always knocked down the icicles in winter. The grisly scene in the market was a freak occurrence, but it did happen. It was more likely for someone to slip on a black patch and crack their head, or for drunks to fall asleep and die in the snow, but a few each year, usually foreigners, found out that ice was deadly sharp when it wanted to be.

Dammit.

He sprinted across the square, through the passage, out into the muddy plaza in front of the Chantry. Barnabas raced ahead and turned left automatically, tearing up the un-shoveled steps of a side street.

The stairs led to a desolate little neighborhood. Most of the the houses were abandoned, with the exception of the graveled walkway to the de Launcet's door at the far end. The only footprints on the snow were those of the birds. It was eerily quiet.

Hawke clutched a stitch in his side, breath steaming out of him. Barney scratched at the red door at the end of the street.

"Barney!" Hawke hissed, slapping his thigh. "Get away from there."

The dog whimpered and waded back through the snow. Now that Hawke was here he suddenly found himself shivering in a way that had nothing to do with cold. He hadn't seen this door in weeks. Just the sight of it sent a jolt, heavy and sickening, down his throat and around his heart. It was hard not to sway, between the knife in his chest and the torch under his groin.

But, sure enough, the passage over the door was lined with daggers of ice.

Hawke sighed. Fenris was likely asleep. Or else had decided, in his usual way, to be contrary and treat winter as some adversary he could wait out.

Hawke stood there, legs numb below the knee, and had a vision. Fenris waking up. Shrugging on a blanket ripped from some sunken bed in the mansion. Stepping out, bleary, hungover, tugging the door shut with a sharp snap-

"Shit."

Hawke paced back and forth. Fenris wouldn't even think of it. It would never occur to him. He could barely fathom that people lost toes to this kind of weather, let alone that ice could kill you. Not that these icicles were anything deadly, but still.....they could knock him out.

.....in which case he'd freeze to death. Tomorrow Hawke would be passing the guards throwing a tarp over his corpse, yanking the red favor off his wrist to blow their noses with it.

He unstrapped his staff. It was common knowledge that the dashing young bachelor residing in the Amell Estate miiiiiiight be a proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing, but there was a wide margin between rumor and getting caught with your woolly breeches down. A flame to melt the ice or even a quick defrosting spell would be a damning sight for any sleepy noble peeking out their window.

Hawke sighed. He hopped and slashed at the icicles.

It was harder than it looked. The ice took each swing like a block of marble. Within a few minutes his arms started to ache.

"Come off, damn you....."

He flailed, swinging wide, and the biggest icicle cracked against a wall. Huffing a laugh, he leaped again, this time taking out a tiny row of teeth, each one dropping with a little plip in the snow.

"Garrett?"

Hawke gasped and slipped. The crack of his head against the cornerstone of the mansion drove a scream out of him. His knees hit brickwork and he rolled into the snow, fingers laced across his neck, blind and deaf except for the shrieking pain jumping up his spine into the base of his skull.

Something sharp touched his back. Five very sharp somethings, to be exact.

He squinted. Fenris stood beside him, mouth a perfect upside down U, the rest of his scowl shadowed by a heavy hood and cloak. Hawke's eyes dropped to his feet.

"You bought boots!" And, as if this morning wasn't ridiculous enough, he laughed until pain stabbed through his skull and drove him face down.

"I uh, took them off someone." Fenris checked the street. "Are you injured?"

"No, just, Andraste's ass, here-"

Fenris tugged him to his feet. Barney was whining and circling, making excited little hops until Fenris pushed him away. "What exactly were you doing?"

"Clearly I was hexing your door. But damn if I forgot the virgin's blood." Hawke touched the side of his head and checked his glove. "I'd ask you for a pint, but we both know you don't have any."

Fenris' face darkened. It was the same expression of disgust and discomfort he wore whenever he passed Hawke now. Passed him in the Hanged Man, passed him in the Chantry, passed him in the square....it didn't matter. Wherever Hawke was going, Fenris was leaving, head down, shoulders hunched, fists tight and ready for a fight.

Now here he was. The ghost himself.

Hawke searched himself for a shred of the affection that wasn't a raw, open wound. He wanted to kiss him. He wanted to push him in the snow. Instead what he said was,

"What in the bloody void are you doing up?"

"I just finished a job," said Fenris. The tips of his ears and nose were red with cold. From the look of him, it had sunk into his chest, and Hawke was standing between him and his hearth. "You still haven't answered what you were doing waving your staff at my door."

"Icicles. They kill."

Fenris was staring through him now.

"An icicle fell on a man in the market today and split his head in two. I thought, well, Fenris doesn't give a fig, he'll snap his door shut without even looking up-"

"So you came...." Fenris' patience was a thin thing. "Under the assumption that this is my first winter in Kirkwall."

"You could sound a little more grateful."

Fenris shut his eyes. "Go home, Hawke."

He brushed past him. Fenris took out his house key....then glanced at the icicles hanging over his head. He shot Hawke a dirty look, took one step to the left out from under them, and unlocked the door.

It slammed after him a second later, leaving Hawke out in the cold.

"Fine," he murmured. "Fine." 

His skull was killing him, but Hawke took a few more swats at the remaining icicles with his staff until they were all gone. Then he kicked Fenris's door, hard, to get some feeling back in his toes, then kicked it again for good measure.

"See if I'm back tomorrow to save your ass," he murmured, and tugged his cloak tighter around him.

Somehow, with an aching heart, he knew he would be.


	4. Tooth Ache (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fenris has a tooth ache. Hawke has a solution.

"You really need to yank that out, kitten."

Isabela pressed against Fenris, her ample bosom warming his arm as she squinted at what felt like a shark hook lodged in his gumline.

"I'm serious," she said. "How long have you had that nasty thing?"

Fenris shut his mouth and shrugged. In truth, the tooth had never bothered him until the night before, when he had almost killed himself on three bottles of Aggregio and gone to sleep with a plantation's worth of sugar coating his teeth. He'd woken up with a dragon of a hangover, and a tooth that felt like raw coral.

"I know a guy in Dark Town who collects elf teeth." Varric swept down with their drinks and shoved them across the table. "He'll pry it out for a silver and-"

"Pass." Fenris contemplated the ale warily.

"On a ship, whenever a crewman gets a bad tooth, the men take turns punching him in the jaw. We could all-"

 _"Pass."_  Fenris raised the ale to his lips. That morning he'd eaten breakfast on one side of his mouth. Water might as well have been acid, and that meant....

"You know, Fenris...." Hawke had been silent until now, and frowned in his usual dour manner from the end of the table. "I can take it out for you."

Fenris spat ale over Varric's head. He didn't even realize he was banging on the table until Isabela covered his hand with her rough one and scratched his scalp with a chuckle.

"That's our Fenris." She gave his head a poke. "Why fix the problem when you can let it drive you mad."

"I promise you," said Hawke. "It will be quicker than punching it out."

" _Fine_ ," hissed Fenris. "Fine."

"Good man." The smirk on Hawke's face was a little too smug for his liking. "Do you want to do it now?

"I prefer not to have an audience." Fenris batted away Isabela's hand. "Bring whatever method you have to the mansion tonight....and forgo the wine."

~

Fenris was probing the tooth with his tongue when Hawke waltzed in. Barnabas crowded in between his knees, doing his customary circle around the room to sniff at the corners before collapsing beneath the table. Two reading lessons and you'd think they lived here.

"This method doesn't involve the mabari, does it." said Fenris wearily, sitting up in his chair.

"There's more to Fereldens than dogs, you know. Not much, but a little."

"What is this method you spoke of."

"Hawke swept back his cloak and unsheathed a dagger in one fluid movement. He offered it to Fenris hilt first.

"You expect me to gouge it out of my head?" Leave it to a barbarian to go for the most barbaric method.

"No, we're going to knock it out with the pommel." Hawke nudged the dagger at him, directing Fenris' eyes to a spiked wedge of black iron. "It's quick, accurate, and over before you have a chance to scream, 'oh shit.'"

Fenris felt his body tense. Even though he had known Hawke for three years, he did not know the man, not truly. They'd only just started his ridiculous reading lessons, which, if this solution was anything like those, would begin and end with cursing.

He did not like the idea of a dagger near his head.

"You have done this before?"

"To a few friends. Camping with smugglers in the Ferelden wilderness requires a bit of improvisation."

"A ringing endorsement." He sighed. This could not go on. If need be, he could overpower Hawke. The rogue was quicker than him, but he was stronger. "Do as you wish."

"Sit on the floor for me. Please."

Fenris settled by the hearth and Hawke took his seat. A flare of panic cut through Fenris that had nothing to do with the anticipation of pain.

"Is this necessary?" he asked, cursing himself for the waver in his voice.

"I need the angle." Hawke reached for his head.

Fenris almost jerked back, then forced himself to open wide. Hawke ghosted a hand up his throat--directing but not touching--to his chin. There was a strange, misty look in his eyes as he did so, before he shivered back to attention and lifted the dagger, holding it tight at the cross guard like a dart.

"Be very, very still."

Stillness was something Fenris knew how to do. Most of his life as a bodyguard had required him to be a statue at Danarius' side. Nor was he a stranger to pain.

Even so, if Hawke wanted, all he would have to do was flip the dagger and drive it into Fenris' skull. He had seen him do it before with the same blade: stab a man through the eye and rip out the dagger to wipe on his pants before the body hit the floor.

Fenris really wished he'd braved the wine. 

"One....two......"

He never heard three. There was a sound like a mace splitting his skull, followed by the red smack of his ear against the fireplace.

Over it all, the reassuring echo of someone screaming, "Oh shit! Oh shit!"

~

He woke with half his face numb.

"Open-" His mouth did so of its own accord, and something red and sopping slid out. It was replaced by what smelled like his night shirt. "Bite down."

Fenris did. Squinting, he blearily made out Hawke by the fireplace.

"You-" Fenris gagged on the cloth. "Have never done that before."  

"I've....seen it done. Sorry." Hawke tossed a blood soaked rag in the fire. "But here."

He presented the tooth to Fenris. It was black-dappled and evil as a wasp-eaten apple, the roots of it red with threads of flesh still attached to them. It made his stomach churn.

"It came loose pretty nice. I had to use my fingers though, after you passed out."

Fenris let his head fall back against the pillow. He actually let this man do this to him. He actually let this big, thuggish Ferelden hit him in the head with a sharp blunt object and then root around in his bloody mouth with his dog-smelling fingers.

He wondered if the Maker was laughing at him.

A plink, and Hawke dropped the tooth in a tin cup and placed it on his chest. "You'll probably want to swish vinegar around your mouth for a few days. I can get you some from our kitchen." 

"A thousand thanks." Fenris frowned. "Did you....tuck me in?"

"You were on the floor covered in blood." Hawke's back was to him. "I uh, couldn't leave you there."

Fenris shut his eyes. "Out."

"Right. You probably need....rest or something." Hawke shuffled in place a moment, then gathered his dagger from the table. "Barney will keep watch until I get back."

The implication of the words didn't hit him until Hawke was out the door. Fenris turned his head and was greeted by the giant dog's tongue inches from his face, drool wetting his pillow as the mabari blinked moistly at him.

"I was better off with the pirate," he murmured. The mabari whined and began to slobber.

Yes, the Maker was definitely laughing at him. 


	5. A Cave In The Frostbacks (Male Trevelyan/Dorian Pavus)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hakkonites capture and plan to humiliate Trevelyan before sacrificing him on their altar. Dorian can only look on in horror. 
> 
> warning: non-con

“On behalf of the Inquisition, I must inform you that you are creating a diplomatic incident—”

A fist plowed into Trevelyan’s face. He crashed to the cave floor and did not move. 

“Inquisitor!” Cassandra flung herself against her restraints. The gathered Hakkonites laughed. One put his boot against her chest and pressed her back in the mud.

Dorian for his part was content to stay silent. His mana was dead, his eyesight dimming, and his hair wet with blood. For the first time in his life, he did not think he could fight back even if he wanted to.

Solas seemed in a similar state. He knelt beside Dorian, quiet save for the occasional hiss when rope dug into a knife wound in his side.

And above them all, reclined on a depressingly cliché throne of bones, was the leader of the Hakkonites himself.

“Save your pretty words, lowlander.” His laughter boomed around the cavern. “Your blood will paint my altar this night and give rise to Hakkon’s glory: the death of one Inquisitor washing out the vile stain of another.”

Trevelyan turned his face in the mud. "You won’t release my companions?”

The thane's brown teeth glistened. “Why send them away when they have yet to witness your deepest shame? Before the night is over, Inquisitor, you will kneel for me in more ways than one.”

No. No no _no no no._ Dorian dry heaved. This could not be happening. _How_ had this happened?

Embarrassingly easy, as it turned out. They had been ambushed in the swamp. The Hakkonites moved like mist, separating them and sapping their strength one by one until they fell to nets and clubs. Dorian's blood still vibrated with the sickening drain he had inflicted on himself. Spell after spell, fireball after fireball, each mind blast and raised corpse costing him more and more until the demons howled in his head and a rock cracked against his skull. He had suffered retreats in the past, but never such a crushing defeat.

The last defeat he would ever suffer, apparently.

He could scarcely breathe from the thought of it. All those years studying in Tevinter’s most prestigious academies, all that time planning change in the Imperium, and he was going to die on his knees in a cave, butchered by barbarians in a nameless gutter of the earth. The simple truth of it shocked him. Was he so naive that he never saw this coming? So drunk on the Inquisition's self-made propaganda that he never imagined it might end this way?

He was going to die.

He was going to _die_.

The irony that they would end up like Ameridan was not lost on him. A thousand years from now, scholars and historians would ponder the same question: what became of Inquisitor Trevelyan and his stalwart companions in that swamp? 

No one would ever know Dorian Pavus spent his last moments weeping as the only man he ever loved was raped to death in front of him.

“Separate the spares.”

 _No._  His vision blackened at the edges. _Amatus-_

Rough hands seized him. Dorian scratched desperately at the Veil, searching for mental flint to strike a fire, but his will might as well have been wet parchment. By the time they were halfway across the cave his legs gave, and he had to be dragged by his neck like a dead pheasant.

They slung him on a bed of piss-stinking straw. Solas grunted beside him. Cassandra spun a second before the cage door slammed and flung herself at the bars, shaking loose grit and moss from the ceiling.

“The Maker will see you judged!” she screamed, and that only made the Hakkonites laugh harder.

Trevelyan was left alone outside the cage. The Avvar spread out in a loose circle around the cavern, lighting torches and pulling up crates.

“Amatus….”

“It’s all right, dove.” Trevelyan's nose was a dripping red faucet and every inch of him covered in blood. “Just breathe.”

“Oh, really?” Dorian’s laughter was near hysteria. “Such rousing advice from a man on his knees!”

"Weren't you just trying to convince me the other day that it's the most powerful position?"

Dorian swallowed a laugh, or maybe a sob. Just a fortnight ago they had lain in a hut in Svarah Sunhair's village, Trevelyan tucked under his arm while the sweat dried on their skin. All morning, the words of a thousand-year dead elf echoed over and over in Dorian's ears: _beloved. Inquisitor._ And now here he was, _his_ beloved Inquisitor pressed tight against him, his snide, vulgar, insufferably cleverer-than-you Inquisitor, who doted on his bog unicorn, who loudly mocked Vivienne's Wintersend gown and lived to tell the tale....who for some impossible reason had chosen Dorian, and kissed the beauty mark beside his eye each night before sleep.

This could not be happening. 

“Enough!” The leader of the Hakkonites banged his staff against the floor. “Cut his bonds. Let us see the lowlanders' Herald dance.”

“I’ll need music,” said Trevelyan.

The thane's grin faltered.

“Inquisitor!” Cassandra’s eyes shone with furious tears. “You do not have to do this.”

“Cassandra." Trevelyan sighed. “Since when have I ever passed up a chance to make a fool of myself?”

“Your silver tongue is known even in these parts, Fade-Walker," said the thane. "Unless you would see it ripped out of you head, I suggest your feet start moving.”

“A drum is all I ask, and maybe some pipes. If I'm to be a jester I might as well be the best jester I can be...unless you're afraid I've outwitted you with my plans to gambol about like a jackanapes.”

The thane's eyes narrowed. He could smell the trick here—or perhaps Dorian merely hoped this wasn’t useless stalling. After a moment he yelled something in a guttural tongue and a few men stalked off and, sure enough, returned with drums and a flute. One of them stepped forward and slashed the ropes binding Trevelyan.

“My eyes are upon you, mage." The thane waved a finger up and down. “Now, let's see the shameful thing that will be riding my cock.”

The drums began. They boomed and echoed around the cavern, joined by a wailing flute that had the Hakkonites hooting and jeering.

The Inquisitor stood alone in the middle of the cave and bowed his head.

Trevelyan's fists opened and closed....

....then his hips started to move.

Back—

—and forth.

Back—

—and forth. The rhythm rolled his body to one side....then to the other.

Faster....and faster.....testing the beat.

The laughter petered out. Dorian and Cassandra blinked at each other.

What in the world.

Fortunately, the rest of the cave was just as baffled. Even the thane raised an eyebrow.

The only one unperturbed was Solas, who watched with little more interest than a muttered "of course."

Trevelyan threw his head back. His hands slid down his body, under the sash around his waist. A twist, and he spun himself out of it, hitching the red fabric up and around his arms before tossing it aside.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Next the leather duster. He snatched it up his shoulders, arching his back and neck as he worked the sleeves down—then off.

A slick palm snaked under the collar of his shirt. His other hand wandered southward, ghosting a hip, his mouth open in a silent moan.

....was it getting warmer in the cave?

Flick flick flick. Shirt unbuttoned. Trevelyan was a skinny man, all ribs and sharp elbows, but the way his body undulated, sweaty and gleaming in the torchlight….

Dorian did a double take. The thane's hand rested over his groin.

The drumming picked up. So did Trevelyan. Off! The shirt fluttered into the crowd. A Hakkonite woman grabbed it out of the air and let out a whoop with a whole string of question marks behind it.

A few started clapping along.

_We’ve all gone mad. This can’t be real._

But it was. Trevelyan unhitched his belt, sliding a finger along the glinting buckle, then snatched his arm taut and slung it against the wall. His hand swept down his bare torso to grip the juncture of his thigh, _hard_.

The flute shrieked! He spun and leaped at the cage bars like a beast.

“Solas,” said the half-naked Inquisitor conversationally.

“Inquisitor,” said Solas.

Gone! Across the cave, swift as an arrow, right into the lap of a Hakkonite on a barrel.

Trevelyan spread his legs wide. The Hakkonite blinked rapidly, stunned, until Trevelyan knotted his fingers in his hair and licked a stripe up his cheek. He spun away before the man could react, leaving a bloody hand-print on his face.

Something crackled in the air then. A tension broken. Sweat poured down Trevelyan's body, and he was red, _crimson_ red. The blood from his nose and oozing wounds smeared all over him.

It drew the lust out of the Hakkonites. 

None were left wanting for his attention. Trevelyan stalked and whored himself around the circle, tricking fingertips down a cock here, up a slit there, writhing hard against them when he needed to be emphatic.

In turn, they ravaged him with their hands.

Slap.

Squeeze.

Twist.

 _S_ _pit_.

Trevelyan's grin was a feral thing and it widened with each violation. His bloody prints were all over them, and Dorian wanted to vomit.

It wouldn't be long now. The threat of rape hung heavy in the air, charged as a lightning spell. When a Hakkonite grabbed Trevelyan from behind, Trevelyan shut his eyes and slid his arms around his neck, letting the man pluck at his laces. He stepped on the back of his left boot and kicked it off, followed by the right. A quick shimmy and a woman yanked his breeches off, leaving just his smalls.

Dorian's vision swam. The drums pounded inside his blood and into his bones.....he was going to pass out. This had to be a nightmare. What in the world was he doing? _Why_ was his lover doing this? Didn't he care that Dorian was watching-

As if he'd heard, Trevelyan's eyes flicked to him. 

It was like meeting the gaze of a serpent.

 _Who are you?_  

The barbarian slobbered on his neck. His pawing grew rougher, bolder. Trevelyan tore himself away and staggered to the center of the circle. The flute was like a screaming child, and all around, the Hakkonites like wolves.

And then the Inquisitor looked up, and returned the laughing gaze of the thane.

He prowled up the steps to the throne, all but crawling into the thane's lap and settling against him. Trevelyan reached for the last pitiful stitch of clothing he wore. The thane slapped him across the face.

“So the rumors about the Inquisitor are true, I see,” he chuckled.

“Evidently,” said Trevelyan, and slipped a penknife out of his smalls and stabbed him in the throat.

The spray was spectacular.

All music immediately cut off. A Hakkonite shouted, one picked up a bow and another a spear—

Trevelyan spun and raised a bloody hand. “STOP.”

Every Hakkonite did.

Dorian shuddered. He _felt_ the spell slither over his skin. Its energy clawed beneath his eyeballs, prickled under his toenails, licked his guts, vile and vicious and gleeful—

Cassandra gasped in horror next to him.

“Drop your weapons,” said Trevelyan.

The clatter of swords and daggers rang around the cavern.

“Good. Now release my friends.”

In any other scenario, it would be comedic watching twenty Avvar trudge towards the cage and bonk into it.

“No, dammit, whoever has the key, open the door. The rest of you go find the nearest cliff and practice cartwheels.”

The gaoler eventually presented himself from the horde and opened the cage. Dorian watched the Avvar shuffle one by one beyond the torchlight, off to find their death.

“Well done.” Solas grunted to his feet. “An interesting choice of misdirection, but given their numbers—”

“You are a blood mage,” said Cassandra. She sounded even more on the verge of tears than before. “Inquisitor, how could you?”

The thane's lifeblood pulsed against him in weaker and weaker streams. “You would have preferred I let us die?”

From Cassandra’s expression, the answer was obvious.

“I’m not going to apologize for a last resort, Cassandra.”

“The people will need to know—”

“Oh, stop bawling into your frock.” Trevelyan hopped off the thane's huge lap and flicked his fingers. “Crowd over here.”

He cut them loose. Dorian he left for last. The grimace Trevelyan gave him was the first sign of shame he’d shown all day.

“I believe you owe me a story,” said Dorian icily.

“Not a dance?” said Trevelyan, though his humor was tired.

“I take it you didn’t learn your skill set in the Circle?”

“No,” said Trevelyan, in a voice that was strange and sad. “But the Circle isn’t the world, thankfully.”

As they made their miserable way out of the cave, limping and leaning on each other, Dorian wasn’t sure what to be thankful for....

Other than this chapter of his life, and the Inquisitor’s, would all but be lost to history.


	6. Window (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke and Fenris enjoy a moment of peace in their garden.

Hawke’s mabari slept with his head on a faded cushion tossed over the sill of the second story garden window. His massive jowls fluttered with snores, a picture of serenity.

“Do you never fear him falling?” asked Fenris, marking his place in his book.

“Barney?” Hawke leaned up from where he knelt in the flowerbed, his face streaked with black soil. “Nah."

“You grant him a great deal of freedom.”

“He’s just sleeping in the window, Fen.” Hawke measured a plot of dirt with a spade. “It's his spot.”

Barnabas’s ears had pricked at their voices. The dog was always present at Hawke’s side, in some way or another. Whether physically padding alongside him or simply shedding hair all over his upholsry and sheets, the mabari was a constant....and would be for a long time, if Hawke’s declarations could be believed.

“You should be more careful,” said Fenris, opening his book again from the garden bench. “The way you let him out at night—it would require no difficulty for one of your enemies to toss him poisoned meat.”

“He knows not to take food from strangers.” The spade made a crisp noise in the earth. Hawke picked up a pot of pink hyacinths and dropped them in the hole. “Why so concerned?”

Fenris didn’t answer right away. Genitivi’s description of the Hundred Pillars was amusing in its southerness.

“For an animal you prize so highly,” he murmured, turning the page, “You're hardly careful with him.”

Hawke hmmmed, and shuffled his distracting buttocks over to the next plot. “I trust him, and he’s a smart dog.” He curled his nose. “You’ve got snails on your strawberries.”

“Show me.” Fenris closed his book and crossed the garden to Hawke’s side. Sure enough, a brown-shelled snail was stretching its eye stalks at them, and at a still-green strawberry on the bud.

Fenris had planted the strawberries with Hawke in spring, just a few months after their reunion. As expected, Hawke ended up doing most of the work, but the memory of them dubbing ‘Fenris’s strawberries’ side by side was still fresh in his mind.

He grabbed the snail and chucked it over the wall into the Rhinehardts' garden.

“I hear if you put beer out they'll crawl into the cup and drown,” said Hawke.

“We have much in common then." Fenris plucked yet another offending snail off the plant and cracked its shell between his fingers.

“You know,” said Hawke, squinting back at the house against the sun. “If you’re so worried about Barney, you can go with him on his evening walks. Half the time he ends up playing cards at the Hanged Man anyway.”

“I will not take over dog walking duties for you.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Hawke pressed his nose into the hyacinths. “I do worry about him….but I like seeing him happy more. He’s a mabari warhound. He’s never going to be content just lazing about fat and fed.”

Fenris sighed and craned his neck back to the dog lying on his cushion in the windowsill, black eyes squinting down as if he understood every word passed between them. Knowing mabari, he probably did.

“He’s just…happier that way.”

 _I am not a dog_ , Fenris almost said. But that was not what Hawke meant. It was never what Hawke meant. It was only Fenris, seeing himself in everything and everyone, and forgetting that, like the mabari, he was sated and sleepy in the late afternoon sun. He was safe.

“I will consider it, Hawke,” he said, and after making sure his strawberries were free of snails, returned to his book and bench. “For your sake, if nothing else.”


	7. Distraction (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke is the worst. 
> 
> nsfw

Hawke watched Meredith pace back and forth in front of her desk for the tenth time before he took a chair.

"Am I boring you, Champion?" she asked.

"Not at all, Knight-Commander. I simply sustained an injury while hunting down your blood mages," said Hawke.

Truthfully, the only reason he needed to sit was because he and his companions had been forced to listen to an hour-long lecture on "how deep the  _kurrrrruption_  of the Circle goes." Every time he cleared his throat Meredith raised her voice as if over a flare of market traffic outside.

 _I should pretend to have a kidney stone._  That wouldn't be below his dignity, right? He did just kill two dangerous apostates for this woman, nevermind letting a third one go after presumably the greatest fifteen seconds of Emile de Launcet's life.

"The city teeters on the verge of open rebellion," said Meredith, sweeping her fingertips across her desk. "All of Thedas will burn if these stirrings of mage insurgency are not eradicated."

"I find that doubtful," said Hawke.

"Oh? Have you yourself not witnessed firsthand the price of negligence? The Order has worked _tirelessly_ -"

A wasp buzzed outside the window. It rammed its head against the glass:  _tap tap tap._ Hawke found himself drifting back to the earlier events of the day, to Emile de Launcet. That poor kid. He'd have his coin stolen and his throat slit before sundown--a fate kinder perhaps than the one he would have endured upon his return to the Circle, but still....Hawke couldn't help but remember of the dazed look on his face as he addled down the Hanged Man's steps, bedded and happy and flushed to the gills with-

"I know what you are thinking," said Meredith.

Hawke jumped. "Is that so?"

"You think me a fool, blind to the suffering of the mages' curse. On the contrary, I am all too familiar with the consequences of too much compassion. When I was a girl, my sister-"

What was he thinking about? Emile de Launcet. Sex. Right. When was the last time he'd passed time with Fenris?

 _Fenris._ Oh, love.

Fenris was probably alone in his mansion right now, reading in his trash-strewn garden. He'd be seated on the bench under the juniper tree in his leggings and green tunic, nose crinkled as he squinted at the glare on the white pages of his book. He'd look up as Hawke walked into the courtyard and smile-

And, just like a kidney stone, arriving when you least need it, Hawke felt an erection stir.

"You can't be serious!"

Predictably, Anders pointed a finger at Meredith and launched into a tirade about how the templars were to blame for everything. Meredith, in turn, warned him of the consequences of heresy and on and on....

"So templars are absolved of all responsibility? You really can't be that big an idiot," snapped Anders at Sebastian.

"And you cannot truly be so blind!" shouted the archer back. 

"Now is not the time, Anders," said Hawke.  _Not when I need to get out of here._  He crossed his legs and leaned forward. "Are we quite done here, Knight-Commander?"

"Only with the assurance that the Order has your fullest support." Meredith's too-pale eyes slid over him to his companions. "We do what we think is best for this city, mage. That means that sometimes we must push harder-"

Damn her.

"Plow deeper-"

Hawke re-crossed his legs.

"Drive inward again, and again, and again for the truth-"

For pity's sake.

"Until we fulfill our holy mandate to dominate, discipline, and leash those beneath us who would thrust forward their filthy insurrection-"

"Kidney stone." Hawke wrenched open the door and bolted out before anyone could stop him, shoving Cullen hard into a wall and sprinting faster than a shade out of the Gallows.

~

It was cool in the dappled shadows of Fenris' foyer. Hawke's boots crunched through the last of autumn's dead leaves, and sure enough, the sound brought Fenris to his balcony.

"Hawke?" He slid a hand down the banister, taking each step with that springy, lanky gait of his. "I thought you had a meeting with-"

Hawke cleared the stairs in two bounds and wrapped Fenris in a kiss. The elf made a surprised noise, then softened his mouth. By the time Hawke un-suctioned his lips from Fenris' dazed face, they were both shaking and out of breath.

"I just got out of the world's longest, most aggravating verbal torture session, and the only thing that got me through it was the thought of your cock in my ass," he said.

Fenris' eyes widened. They still did that--weeks after they'd rekindled their relationship--as if he could not believe what he was hearing. The smile that curled his lips, however, was anything but tentative.

~

Ten minutes later, Hawke was on his hands and knees in Fenris' bedroom, shirt shoved up around his armpits and trousers bunched around one ankle as Fenris pounded into him like there was no tomorrow.

 _Yes yes yes yes yesssssss._ Fenris slid a hand up Hawke's sweaty back and stroked his ear with a thumb. A small thing, a precious thing, but if it wasn't _everything_. Hawke moaned, and Fenris' hands resumed their place on his hips. 

 _I needed this._  The realization hitched in his chest. Too rare of late were days where he felt whole, safe, complete.

But Maker's Balls, his knees were killing him.

"Wait...." Hawke panted. "Bed, please. Your floor's too bloody hard for this."

Fenris hummed and plucked a single, no doubt gray hair from the back of his head. "I wonder why."

"We can't all be unfairly youthful like YOU-"

Fenris hauled him up by the waist and threw, _threw!_ him arse over teakettle into bed. Hawke flung off his shirt and let his arms fall back against the mattress, allowing himself be dragged to the edge and his thighs shoved apart. He started to reach for his cock, but Fenris swatted his hand away.

"Oh, bastard." Hawke gritted his teeth at the flare of pain, just as quickly replaced by pleasure and a little _ah_ that spread his legs wider. He craned his neck to enjoy the view.

Fenris' long torso undulated between his thighs, his tempo steady and indifferent to Hawke's whimpers for mercy. Fenris would fuck him as he always did--keeping the same maddening pace no matter how Hawke moaned and begged until he pushed him over the edge and took his pleasure.

Hawke hated him and loved him for it, but really it was all love. Not that Fenris didn't know it. The cheeky shit.

....though, Hawke wondered, vaguely, if he should feel ashamed for bolting out of what was likely an important meeting with the most deranged and powerful political figure in the city. That was his job, wasn't it? To maintain peace and balance and ensure Kirkwall didn't tear itself apart-

What was he thinking about. Emile de Launcet, no, Meredith, no, Fenris! 

 _Definitely Fenris._ The elf grinned smugly as he at last bottomed out and got the Champion of Kirkwall to howl like a whore on the end of his cock. It was hard to think much after that.

"Oh, oh fuck, I love it, I love you!" Hawke came hard on his stomach. Fenris redoubled his grip and fucked him in earnest until the only sound was the maddening slap of flesh and the shaky, astonished cries of Hawke coming all over himself again.

The elf finished not long after with a hiss. He collapsed panting over him and took in his lover with an expression somewhere between indulgence and annoyance. "How is it that you get yourself so filthy?"

"I 'unno." It was difficult to form coherent thought. "I told the Knight-Commander I had a kidney stone and left early."

Fenris didn't seem surprised. "I'm sure when you come limping into her office next time, she'll believe you."

Hawke tugged him into a kiss. He was content to hold him there in his trembling arms as long as he could, for no reason other than the creeping suspicion that he might, just might, have a burning city to deal with in the morning. 


	8. Becoming Him (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Champion wears many masks. Fenris wonders how many of them he takes off.

“Do you want to see me become him?”

Fenris pumped cold water from the alienage fountain over his face and neck. “Come again?”

“The Champion. Do you want to see me become him?” asked Hawke.

Fenris rose and shook his hair.  “Last I checked, you are the Champion.”

“Ah, but no one’s recognized me today, have they?”

“No one in the sewers, you mean?”

His tone was sharper than he'd intended. They stood ankle-deep in dung and mud under the shade of the vhenadahl tree, their faces greasy black from an afternoon seeking out “important” potion ingredients for Anders. On top of that, Fenris' toes were covered in stinging rat bites, his back hurt from scrambling down dark tunnels, and his throat burned from fumes. The sweltering heat and their combined stink had put him in a poor mood for games.

“Look around, no one’s staring at us. Don’t you find that odd?” said Hawke.

"They're degenerate and starving slum elves. I doubt they care who we are."

“That’s because I’m not _him_ right now. I bet you a pretty silver that by the time we get back to High Town everyone will recognize me.”

“You’ll have to bet more than that,” said Fenris, lifting the pump again and holding his feet under the spray.

“I’ll pay off your Wicked Grace debt to Varric.”

The pump screeched to the halt. 

“Thought so." Hawke grinned. "Watch and learn.”

He nudged him over and started the pump. Fenris folded his arms and waited as Hawke washed the blood and grime from his neck, face, and beard. He slicked back his wet hair, adjusted his knives, and then—

Hawke _became_ him.

Like a bird of prey hovering calm as a kite one moment and then diving like a thrown spear the next, Hawke transformed. His eyes sharpened, his spine straightened, the lines of his face hardened like a mask slipping into place.

It was magic; there was no other word for it. He struck a match somewhere deep inside him that turned the midday sun dark.

A woman carrying a basket of laundry turned her head. Her two children playing in the mud beside her quieted and stared.

Hawke nodded at them and started toward the stairs.

Apprehensive, mesmerized, Fenris followed.

 

* * *

 

The docks were crowded as ever. The shouts of sailors and the creak of cargo hoists intermingled with the cries of seagulls and overseers. Whores lounged in the shade, fishmongers waved flies away from their wares, and one-earred toms sunned themselves on the flagstones. Hawke took his time on the alienage stairs. He leaned into his strides, eyes up and scanning the crowd.

And rippling outward, the heads turned.

Merchants stopped haggling. In an alley, two Carta dwarves shrank back into the shadow like rats. Several pirates hid their faces as Hawke passed.

Like a mighty pike pushing upstream, the Champion parted the onlookers, leaving a wake of silence and seething fear in his wake.

The effect carried them upward into Lowtown.

Fenris followed like a shadow. He was used to Hawke's effect on enemies in combat, to say nothing of the terrified reverence his title inflicted upon the nobility. This, however...

It was one thing to be recognized as the Champion of Kirkwall when he had a mabari bristling at his side and his companions armed to the teeth at his back. It was quite another to be recognized at nothing but a glance.

“Serah.” A merchant nodded.

“Champion,” murmured a templar.

“Champion.” A baker sweeping his storefront waved.

Upward and onward, the rough brick stairs became smooth granite and limestone. 

“Champion.” A guard saluted.

"Serah Hawke." An elvhen courier touched his cap.

"Champion Hawke!" a fowler called and held up two flapping chickens. 

Upward and onward, the granite and limestone gave way to rich tile and mosaic.

Each time the mask of the Champion of Kirkwall shifted. A little softer for a blacksmith, a pinch of the mouth for a street performer, a darkened brow for the pickpocket who glared back. Each one flickered and settled into place: variations on the heavy, bronze mask that was Hawke's face, each as real and practiced and seamlessly worn as—

Hawke's eyes flicked back to him. The corners of his lips crinkled in mirth, the same way they did for the baker, for the guard, for the little girl whose dog he petted. 

The same way they did for Fenris every night. 

Maker, how had he never noticed?

 

* * *

 

They passed the Amell Estate and started across the square to the chantry. The smooth cobbles soothed the soles of Fenris’ aching feet as they arrived at last to the shaded door of his mansion. Hawke shoved a shoulder against the swollen wood, and they staggered into the blessedly cool darkness of his antechamber, where the only sunlight was the keyholes of dusty light between the dead ivy clinging to the ceiling.

Hawke let out a sigh…and it all fell off him. As simple as a discarded mask, the Champion disappeared.

He perked up like a dog after a dust bath then, happy and grinning.

“Well?” His face slipped a little. “What’s wrong?”

Fenris brushed past him. His feet clattered the loose tiles of the foyer and creaked the stairs as he took them to the second landing. The sunlight inside his bedroom was a weak, green tea filtered through the shifting leaves of the juniper tree in the garden. The bed was unmade, and the room smelled of them.

Smelled of the man he took to bed all the time now.

The man who wore more masks than an Orlesian.

Hawke’s hands fell gently on his shoulders.

“You wear the title well,” said Fenris.

“That’s why I take him off,” said Hawke. “Gets heavy, lugging him around all the time. The Champion’s a real pain in my back, you know?”

Fenris did know. The real question was whether he would ever be able to look at him the same way again.  

“And now?" he asked.

Hawke turned him slowly around. He took Fenris's hands and lifted them to his face. His eyes shut, and Fenris felt the skin under his fingertips relax and unburden itself. 

"Now I'm yours," he said.

It was too hot to touch each other, so they stripped to their smalls and sipped cold ale in bed, listening to the leaves rustle outside. Hawke’s eyelids eventually drooped in the sunlight and he drifted off to sleep.

Fenris watched him the whole time, stroking his hand with a thumb in small, tight circles. As the shadows lengthened, and their features were slowly lost in darkness, it struck him that the man beside him could be anyone or no one. 

He wasn't sure he wanted to know. 


	9. Callipygian (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke is a man of great assets.
> 
> nsfw

After a week holed up with Hawke in his crumbling mansion, Fenris was beginning to wonder if they'd ever put clothes on again.

Not that he was complaining. There was something liberating about playing cards naked, eating soup in the courtyard naked, reading dirty Antivan poetry at the table naked…

At the moment, he lay abed, watching Hawke wash their dinner plates near the fire. Naked.

“How does a man come to have such an enormous ass?” asked Fenris.

“From sitting on it in High Town and eating Orana’s cooking for three years,” Hawke sighed. 

“It wasn't an admonishment.”

“After the past week? It better not be.” Hawke picked up a grimy washcloth from the basin. “Care to know a secret? Seeing as you’re entitled to them now."

Fenris felt his cock twitch. Drying the plates, as it turned out, set an interesting jiggle to Hawke's backside. “So long as you keep washing my dishes.”

Hawke chuckled. “I have to hire a specialist to tailor my pants. Costs me a bloody fortune to make sure they don't rip as soon as I bend over.” He pointed a soapy finger. “Do _not_ tell Isabela.”

Fenris had every intention of telling Isabela. “Blessed and cursed in the same breath. Why does that not surprise me?”

“Story of my life.” Hawke set the last plate aside and flicked his fingers. “It was worse when I was younger, to be honest. I could feel grown men mounting me with their eyes. I’d go to the chantry and ask, 'why? What did I do to deserve this?'”

Fenris wasn’t sure what to say to that. Of all the curses the Maker could inflict on a man, “enormous buttocks” had to be somewhere near the bottom, right next to “a lifelong love of puns.” 

“So long as you're happy now….?” he ventured.

“I could do with a more affordable wardrobe....but yes, I have been feeling ever so much more appreciated as of late.”

Damn him. Fenris’ cock hardened up his thigh, leaving a shiny trail on his skin. Hawke’s smile was infuriating, as were his hands, and his absurd rear, and every new detail he deigned to share about himself. 

“In any case,” said Hawke, drying his hands, “we can’t all be ridiculously lithe like you.”

“Nor would I want you to be. Come here.”

Hawke flashed a grin. “Make me.”

Fenris raised an eyebrow. He lay with his arms behind his head, cock twitching against his stomach.

Hawke cursed and vaulted into bed.


	10. Bar Tab (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fenris is a cheapskate.

“Ahem.”

Fenris set down his mug. Corff was drumming his fingers on the smooth bar of the Hanged Man, a resolute set to his shoulders.

“Can you guess what today is?” he asked

Fenris could barely guess the color of the ale in his flagon, let alone the day of the week. As such, the answer swam up slowly to him through a haze of beer and tavern noise.

“My tab—“

“Is due," Corff finished for him. 

“Ah. A moment.” Fenris turned to Hawke beside him at the bar. Hawke raised an eyebrow at him over the rim of his drink.

“The man needs his coin,” he said.

“It’s your tab, you pay him," said Hawke.

Fenris lowered his gaze to his feet. “Of course, you are right. I suppose I will have to give up tomorrow’s food money....and what I was saving to pay off the blacksmith—”

“You eat at my house three meals a day.” Hawke's expression was stony. “And _I_ paid the blacksmith what you owed.”

Fenris dropped his head lower. “When I was a slave, I had no money of my own. The luxury of having coin is something many take for granted, and to be dependent on you, without steady coffers I can rely upon….”

He glanced at Hawke. The man’s golem-like expression had not budged.

"I will need to take a job, then," said Fenris, taking his threadbare little purse from his pocket. "I hear the Golden Sturgeon Company is offering a mercenary contract in the Tirashan. I will only be gone eight months, perhaps nine, if I return at all-"  

"Oh for fuck's sake." Hawke dug into his pocket and turned out a pile of silvers for Corff, then immediately downed another mouthful of grog.

Pleased, Fenris rocked up on his bare toes and kissed Hawke behind the ear. “I will repay the debt.”

"Just make sure it doesn't take another six years to make good on it," said Hawke, and ignored the slow, pitying head shake of the bartender as he counted out the coin. 


	11. Blindfold (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke comes home to a delicious surprise.

When Hawke dumped his gear on the floor of the antechamber of the Amell Estate, the last thing he expected was for Fenris to come through the door bearing a red scarf.

"When did you-" Fenris pressed the cloth over his eyes. "Is it Tuesday already?" Hawke smiled so wide his face ached, then just as quickly felt it fall. "Please tell me Bodahn and Orana are out."

"You are not allowed to ask questions." Fenris turned him around and tugged the ends of the scarf tight against the back of his head. "But to answer, we are safe."

As if to assure him further, Fenris leaned up on his toes and pressed his face to where Hawke's armor met his neck. His lips touched there, not quite a kiss, but just enough to warm the skin.

"Trust me," he whispered.

Hawke couldn't help but grin. It was rare enough for Fenris to take initiative like this, let alone introduce a little kinkery into their usual bedroom routine.

"Let me guess, this is the part where you unmask yourself as the Tevinter spy who for six years plotted to sell me into a magister's harem? Because if not, we can roleplay that bit-"

"You are worse than the dwarf sometimes," sighed Fenris.

He took Hawke's hand and led him into the foyer. Hawke drew their joined hands to his mouth and kissed their intertwined fingers. It earned him a scoff and a yank toward the study.

"Kinkier and kinkier-" Hawke's shoulder collided with the doorway.  _"Ow."_

"Watch your toes," said Fenris, and guided him to sit on a settee that had, curiously, had been turned around to place its back to the fireplace. As instructed, Hawke made sure not kick its clawed feet.

He sighed and relaxed into the cushions. The fire leeched the last of the autumn cold off his neck. He could hear Fenris moving about the room, rustling  _something_ , but damned if he could tell what it was.

"First, a question," asked Fenris, in a strange, stilted voice. "Do you know what today is?"

"Today is...." He blinked under the blindfold. "Maker's breath."

"Your nameday," said Fenris. "You are thirty-six years old."

Hawke slapped his forehead. How in the world had he forgotten? No, he knew exactly why, and their names were Meredith and Orsino. That and the fact that without his mother, Bethany or Carver around there just wasn't anyone left to remember a date he never advertised anyway.

 _"Well,"_  Hawke huffed and stretched his arms across the back of the couch, "count me doubly sorry that I wasted the day running up and down the Wounded Coast. Thank goodness I was sustained by a vision of coming home, getting down on my knees, and wrapping my lips around that big, juicy foreskin of yours-"

Someone gasped.

Someone very not Fenris.

Hawke bolted upright. "Oh shit, there are people here."

He ripped off the blindfold and was sucker punched by the combined laughter of every friend he had in Kirkwall crammed into the study, including on the stairs, on the landing, and leaning against the banister--all of them clapping and cackling. Fenris' cheeks were bright red. Hawke caught sight of Sebastian shaking his head near the liquor cabinet and covered his burning face, sliding down sideways on the couch as shame washed over him.

"I meant prayer! The only thing that sustained me was the thought of us praying!"

But it didn't matter. They were already bringing out the cake, Fenris was scowling, and as Hawke blew out the candles he got the gnawing suspicion that, nameday or no, he wasn't getting any tonight.


	12. Disgrace (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bandits attack in broad daylight.

He's too late.

His sword is an inch from the bandit's exposed back when the man plunges a knife into Hawke's leg. Hawke makes an "ack!" sound like he's been pricked with a darning needle, and the fire he'd been channeling into his staff shoots wide and explodes the top of a pine tree in a rain of cinders. The bandit's eyes widen at that, and widen again as Fenris plunges his sword into his back. 

He kicks the body off and runs to Hawke's side. The mage is on the ground, squeezing his leg under his cloak. His grimace is more from embarrassment than from pain.  

"Let me see," says Fenris.

"It's not that bad-"

"Let me see."

Hawke lifts the flap of his cloak.

The moment Fenris sees the wound, he knows it is over.

Knows—not believes. His face neither pales nor flinches at the sight. If a lifetime of slavery has taught him anything, it is how to control his expression.

"Press here," he says, "I'll get the bandages."

"Think I’m lucky enough for to have nicked an artery?" Hawke grits his teeth and presses hard on the wound. Blood pools up between his fingers and turns the black of his gloves blacker.

"The blood would be darker if it did," says Fenris, which might be true. "Wait here."

His heartbeat is slow as he crosses their demolished camp, stepping over the bodies of bandits and their interrupted dinner. He digs leisurely through their packs, pushing aside Hawke's ridiculous adventure novels until he pulls out their meager pouch of elfroot and a shirt.

The elfroot gums thickly in the wound. Hawke's throat cords in a soundless scream as the shirt is tightened above the bleeding. The fabric is soaked within seconds.

"If Varric was here-" pants Hawke.

"A pity he is not," says Fenris, knotting the tourniquet.

"-this would be the part where I tell him to leave this bit out of the story.” Hawke licks his lips. “My mouth’s dry, give me some water, love."

Fenris passes him a canteen. They are three days' hard hike down the wooded cliffs to the nearest village. They are alone on the scalp of the loneliest mountain for miles, somewhere in the Anderfels, hundreds of leagues and lifetimes away from anyone who knows their names. It had seemed such a good thing yesterday.

“Father always did say I should learn some healing magic,” says Hawke, with a wince that trembles through his whole body. “Pretty sure he's slapping his forehead in the afterlife every time I get myself into a mess like this....”

“Most likely his face is numb by now,” says Fenris.

Hawke gives a weak laugh that teeters on the edge of hysteria, and the reality of the situation makes itself clear. 

The Champion of Kirkwall cannot die like this.

Fenris has watched him slay the Arishok with a single knife cut through the throat, seen him defy a crazed Knight-Commander, witnessed his return from certain death time and again into Fenris's arms as if he'd just returned from an evening walk. He cannot die from something so foolish as a drunken bandit, not after everything they’ve been through, not after facing high dragons and ogres and mad Templars and blood mages and all manner of madness. The Champion of Kirkwall cannot die here.

The man he loves cannot die here.

The moment he thinks the last thought and some mechanism inside him clicks into place, and he knows-

It is over.

"It will be all right, Hawke," says Fenris. “The elfroot will staunch the bleeding.”

"I know, love." Hawke reclines back on his elbow, still digging his free hand's fingers into the now soaked leg of his trousers. "Maker, my throat's so parched. There's no more, is there?"

"No. I'm sorry."

"It's all right. Hold my hand, will you?"

Fenris does. He unlaces his gauntlet and slides his scarred, branded hand into Hawke's dry palm.

"You should lie still." It's times like these that he most misses the mabari and wishes dogs, everything, lived longer. He brings back their gear and spreads the blankets and kit out best he can to make Hawke more comfortable. Then he lies down beside him.

"That fight took a lot out of me," says Hawke. 

"I'd say you took a lot out of them."

"Where’s Varric to record that? He’d be so proud. He always said I'd rub off on you." The lines of his brow wrinkled. "I wonder if he's safe right now."

The sun goes down, and the ground grows cold. Fenris swings a cloak over them both.

"Wake me up if I fall asleep, will you, love? I'm just going to rest my eyes for a bit. I'll be a mess tomorrow if I doze off now."

"I will," Fenris promises.

“Really, though, just a few minutes, and I’ll be better for it. You’ll wake me up, won’t you?”

“Yes,” says Fenris.

“Good." His voice quivers. “ Just a few minutes. Wake me up and we’ll flush this wound out and move into a cave or something, get off this blighted mountain. You’ll wake me up, won’t you?”

Fenris kisses his ear and holds his hand.

"Good. My trusty cuckoo clock, always getting me up at the crack of dawn. Or was that Bodhan? I think I preferred your way of waking me up. At least you never scolded me about missing breakfast."

Hawke laughs and shuts his eyes.

A few minutes later, he doesn't answer when Fenris calls his name. A half hour later, he mutters something Fenris cannot hope to understand then shudders violently as if shaken. Fenris hears a dry rattle in his throat like a wind blowing down an old silo, and that is the end of it.

 

* * *

 

When the morning comes, Fenris rises alone.

Like a ghost, he goes and touches all the things in their camp, all the evidence of themselves. When there is nothing left, he goes down the mountain, deep into the forest, where the sun never touches the ground.

Then he goes mad.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the beginning of a much longer story that I started before Inquisition came out. I'm never going to finish it, but I liked this bit enough that I thought I'd post it here.


	13. Candy (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He came home to find a gift waiting for him.

Fenris regarded the box on his bed warily.

There were only three people in Kirkwall who could slip in and out of his mansion unnoticed: Varric, who dropped by to make sure Fenris ate more than fermented grapes; Isabela, who took things, not left them; and Hawke, who could tickle open any window in the city with an obscene flick of his picks that made Fenris’ ears redden.

Given that the box on his bed was shaking, he placed his bet on Hawke.

He’d only stepped out to use the privy for a few minutes, more than enough time for Hawke to slide down the roof into the garden, unlatch the window, sneak inside, leave his....gift, and then pull himself back up and spring away across the rooftops like a thief in the night. Why the man insisted on playing the rogue instead of coming to the front door...

Sighing, he swung his sword off his back and lifted the box lid off with the tip. The box was red paper, vined with black ink, and was full of….

Chocolate.

Not just chocolate, _moving_ chocolate.

It took him a moment to comprehend what he was seeing. Inside the box were twelve figurines made of white and brown confections. Each one was expertly crafted in the shape of men and women-

Fenris felt his face flush. 

A chocolate man grasped the chocolate globes of a chocolate woman’s ass as she slid up and down his chocolate cock. Two chocolate women’s legs entwined as they rubbed themselves into a chocolate frenzy, while a chocolate man who looked suspiciously like Fenris worked his chocolate fingers into the increasingly large hole in another man's chocolate backside—

“You told  _Sandal_ to do this?” Fenris dropped the box into Hawke’s lap. A triad of frotting men sprang out onto the rug, where they ran in terror from the mabari's tongue.

“It’s not like I showed him what was in the box.” Hawke had jumped when Fenris stormed into his house and now he pouted. "I just told him that there were figurines inside and to make them move. Maker’s balls, Fenris, I wasn’t going to scar him—”

“And what was I to do with these….candies?” Fenris plucked out a pair of rutting milkmaids and snapped them between his fingers. Hawke frowned as the first chocolate woman held the other in her arms as she melted.

“Eat them?”

“I would taste the enchantment,” said Fenris wearily.

“Because of the lyrium you mean?”

“Yes, because of the lyrium.”

“You were never opposed to enchantments before.”

It was true, he went into battle armed with enchanted blades, enchanted amulets and other such enchanted baubles. Those, however, were battle advantages he’d be a fool to turn away….not things he put into his body.

Thankfully, Hawke seemed to understand. “I thought it would be…..”

“Amusing?”

“Stimulating.”

Fenris rolled his eyes and tossed the remaining chocolates into the fire. Their tiny screams made Hawke wince. 

“If you wanted to stimulate me there are easier ways," said Fenris.

"You know, I can't help but feel like you're stifling my creativity." 

“No more gifts. Especially not of this nature.”

"Fine." Hawke slouched like a put-out child and clapped his slippers together. "Will you at least go with me back to the chocolate shop? I swear I won't enchant them this time-" 

"I have other sweets in mind for you," growled Fenris. "Ones that will sate your hunger in far better ways."

"Maker, I love it when you're corny." Hawke let himself be dragged up by the front of his robe. "Though I think this counts as a success in my book-"

Fenris made sure to silence him _creatively_ for that. 


	14. Smile (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A night of peace at the Amell Estate.

Fenris lay awake, listening to the embers pop in Hawke's fireplace and the mabari kick in his sleep.

Hawke himself was curled up against his chest, his skin flushed and still damp with sweat.

 _How did you get here_ , Fenris wondered of himself. Just a few years ago, he had been someone else, _something_ else, who could not have imagined these small, strange gifts that have been bestowed upon him willingly and without price.

He was free.

His master was dead.

The mysteries of his past were laid bare like old, bleached bones.

And now he lay awake in the Champion of Kirkwall’s bed, wrapped in silk sheets, warmed by the spent flesh of the man he loved.

He smiled. The feeling was strange on his face. He smiled for his friends, but to smile privately for no reason other than his own amusement and joy….that was new.

He brushed Hawke’s still damp hair back from his brow. The man’s tattooed face crinkled and he murmured in his sleep.

It was decadent. They spent their days now indulging in each other as if there was no better feeling in the world than the impossible heat of their bodies joined...as if pleasure was a well without bottom, and Fenris was just now learning that he was allowed to drink from it without fear, endlessly, in a cup that runneth over.

“….love?” Hawke murmured sleepily. “You awake?

Fenris wrapped his arms tight around him and kissed his ear. “Go back to sleep. All is well.”

For once in his life, it was true. 


	15. Mad Sally (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fenris finds out just what Hawke is afraid of. 
> 
> Warning: Ill-Advised Provoking of Urban Legends

A storm had just unleashed itself on the roof of the Amell Estate when Fenris pulled the book off the shelf.

It wasn't one he had ever seen before, which was saying something. Across the summer and fall, he had cut a bloody swath through the Amell Estate library, devouring books at such a rate that Hawke had, embarrassingly, bought him a child's wagon to cart them to and from their respective mansions.

The book in his hand had nothing in common with the austere histories and religious texts that populated Hawke's library. It was threadbare, tattered at the edges, its binding frayed and held together by string. And embossed on its cover was-

"I was wondering where I put that!" Hawke gave up scratching his mabari's belly by the fireplace and rocked up off the floor. "Want to venture a guess?"

Fenris slid a thumb over the deep stamp of a werewolf's head on the cover of the book. "Is there something I should know about your family?"

Hawke chuckled and opened the cover for him. "Not prone to that form of lunacy, fortunately." The first page showed the faded print of a title:

  
_THIRTEEN TALES ALL FERELDEN CHILDREN SHOULD KNOW_

by Fernando Genitivi

"Brother Gentivi's less credible younger brother," Hawke whispered, and looked on as Fenris turned the page to what appeared to be an illustration of children caught in a giant spiderweb. "My mother used to read it to us all the time when we were kids. It was one of the few things we brought from Lothering. I don't know why, but when we were running around the house grabbing things, I snatched it off the shelf and threw it in the sack. I just couldn't leave it behind."

"Can't imagine why...." The stiff pages revealed horrors upon horrors. Children stuffed like game hens by cackling blood mages, children dragged into freezing bogs by possessed corpses, children torn limb from limb by werewolves... "Remind me never to raise a family in Ferelden."

"I suppose they are a little grim." He massaged Fenris's shoulders. "Come to bed?"

Fenris grunted. He trailed up the stairs after Hawke while flipping through the book. A flash of lightning threw their shadows huge against the wall, right before thunder shook the windowpanes. Cold rain greased down the glass, all blind and black.

"Some of the pages are more worn than others," Fenris said in the bedroom, while Hawke turned down the sheets.

"You know how well-loved books are," said Hawke. "Like I said, we read it a lot." 

Fenris turned to a place in the book where the spine was broken. The two pages were nearly black. The only illustration to be found was the outline of a woman with huge, void eyes, peering out of the darkness at him. It was, in its simplicity, oddly more disturbing than anything else in the book.

"Mad Sally," he read aloud.

Hawke froze. "Maker's balls, _that one_." He started to unlace. "You ever heard of it?"

"I have not."

"Once upon a time, there was a little girl who woke up one night to hear something scratching at her window. She got up and stared out into the dark, but couldn't see anything. Night after night, she woke up to the same scratching, and every time she threw back the curtains she found only darkness. Then, one day, she went walking in the woods and found a blind old witch sitting beside the forest path, stroking her shawl with long, long fingernails. The witch told her that a silly woman named Sally had grown up in the very house the little girl lived in now. She told the girl that if she covered her eyes at the window and said 'Mad Sally' three times, she would find out at last what the scratching noise was."

"She should have run and told the Templars," said Fenris.

" _Anyway_ , the girl really didn't want to do it, but she was just so curious....So the next night, she got out of bed, pulled back the curtains and said the words....and when she uncovered her eyes, the blind old witch was there inside the bedroom with her long, long fingernails, reaching to pluck out the little girl's eyes and claim them as her own. "Hawke shuddered. "Whenever we wouldn't go to bed, my mother would go to the window and say, 'Mad Sally, Mad Sally-" She never needed to get to three."

Fenris slid a thumb across the illustration. There was something unsettling about it. It was no quaint woodblock print like the other pages. No, this one was saturate violence, something pulled from a nightmare, without pretense of lightness or fun.

It was then that Fenris became aware that he was standing next to the blackened windows.....and that Hawke was watching him.

A little anxiously.

"Mad Sally," said Fenris to the window. "Mad Sally-"

_"Fenris."_

"Mad....Sally."

The fire crackled in the hearth. Hawke stood there with his arms raised as if to stop him.

"You have fought high dragons and rock wraiths and survived the horrors of the Blight and this disturbs you?" Fenris clapped the book shut and tossed it on Hawke's writing desk. "You are an infant."

"Am not," said Hawke. "Andraste's ass, I was just playing with you."

"Hmmm."

With much grumbling, Hawke went around the room blowing out the candles. Fenris lay in bed, on the side farthest from the windows, his arms folded as he watched Hawke tug the curtains closed over them....and after a moment tie their cords.

"It's storming out there," he said, peevishly, pulling up the covers to get into bed. "You think I can sleep with that?"

"I did not say anything," said Fenris, and rolled onto his side.

With the light teasing done, Fenris let himself sink down into the cool sheets. His eyes were aching and tired. Added to that the drone of rain on the roof, and it wasn't long before he felt himself drifting off into a deep sleep.

....for all of five minutes until Hawke pressed hard against his side.

"Hawke," he grunted.

"Sorry."

Fenris shut his eyes again. A high, cold wind shrieked in the trees. A floorboard creaked somewhere downstairs. He felt the edges of his consciousness grow fuzzy-

"Did you hear that?" whispered Hawke. 

"Nuh." 

The storm began to heave and whistle against the house. The pattering of the rain on the courtyard tiles outside would have sounded like footsteps if not for years of training that let Fenris's mind unspool its awareness and gently fall into- 

"Can we switch sides?" said Hawke.

Fenris slapped a hand on the mattress. "You are impossible. There is no Mad Sally. It's just a children's story, and you are an idiot."

"I know, dammit, don't patronize me. It's just...!” Thunder boomed overhead and Hawke clutched at him.

Fenris sat up. "And you would sacrifice me to the beast by putting me closer to the window?" 

"One, you're stronger and faster than I am. Two.....I can't believe we're having this conversation."

"Neither can I. What would your enemies think if they could see you now," said Fenris. And then, an idea came to him. He slipped out of bed. A flash of lightning illuminated the edges of the curtains before a boom of thunder shook the house. "Better yet, I wonder what Bethany would think of this..."

Hawke's eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't."

Fenris crossed to the closed curtains and toyed with one of the tassels. "It has been some time since I wrote her...."

Hawke threw off the covers. "Now you're just playing dirty."

"I'm attempting to salvage what's left of your dignity so we can get to sleep. Come here."

Hawke scowled, but nevertheless crossed the room to stand before the window with him. 

"You have lived in fear of shadows and grumpkins long enough," said Fenris. "A man of your status shouldn't-"

"I get it, all right. Move along."

Fenris untied the curtains and held their edges. "When I count to three, I will pull the curtains back, and you will recite the lines."

Hawke scoffed and covered his eyes. 

"One....two...." Fenris threw back the curtains. 

"Mad Sally," mumbled Hawke. "Mad Sally. Mad...." He hesitated. The rain pelted against the glass in the black, black night. "Sally."

Fenris sighed. "You see? There is not such thing as-"

Hawke dropped his hands, and his expression morphed into raw terror. 

Fenris's reaction was immediate. His lyrium ignited. He seized Hawke's arm, jerked him away from the window, seized an iron candlestick from the nearest table, spun to face the glass-

And was frozen in horror at the sight of a wide-eyed, soulless witch gazing back at him.

 

* * *

 

"I'm so sorry." Merrill shivered under a blanket beside the fire. The mabari was sprawled across her legs, licking the raindrops from her feet. "I got lost on my way home, and it was so dark, and I couldn't find the alley to your back door so I just hopped the garden wall-"

"It's all right, Merrill." Hawke crouched down and gave her a steaming cup of tea. "Once you get warm and dry, you can sleep in the guest room tonight. It's not a problem. Is it, Fenris?"

Fenris leaned against the bed post with his arms folded. His disliked the utterly pleased-as-cream look on the man's face. For his part, Fenris merely _tched_ and turned back to the fireplace.

"Don't mind hm," said Hawke. "You gave him quite the scare."

"I assumed she was an assassin," said Fenris.

Hawke cupped his hand to Merrill's ear. "I gave him a book of scary children stories earlier. It really put him on edge."

"Oh, the one with the wolf head on the cover?" Merrill sipped her tea. "That is scary."

"He was prepared to fight Mad Sally herself to save me." Hawke's eyes twinkled viciously as he glanced at Fenris over his shoulder. "Brave Fen."

Fenris threw his hands up and stomped around to his side of the bed. 

After Hawke deposited Merrill in the guest suite down the hall, he returned to the bedroom and shut the door. The storm had passed, leaving only pools of moonlight shining through the open window onto the floor. 

Fenris considered them from where he lay in bed. Hawke did, too, with that wicked glint in his eye. "It's such a lovely night," said Hawke. "How about we leave the curtains open?"

"Weren't you the one squealing in fear earlier at the thought of not securing them?"

"Funny thing, that, I think my nightmares are cured."

Fenris flung the covers back, again, crossed the floor, and tied the curtains. "For safety," he said emphatically.

"Uh-hmmm." Hawke grinned all the way back to bed. Fenris started to follow him, then stopped to glare at the children's book on the table. He flipped to the place where the spine was broken. Mad Sally leered out at him from the open pages, in a way that suddenly felt mocking. He'd have to find a dusty shelf to hide her in tomorrow, far out of Hawke's sight and mind. 

Otherwise, no one in Kirkwall would ever let him hear the end of this. 


	16. Beloved (Male Trevelyan/Dorian Pavus)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The events of The Jaws of Hakkon stir up bitter feelings between Dorian and the Inquisitor.

The spirit disappeared back into the Fade with a bang, and Trevelyan collapsed.

“Are you all right?” said Dorian, pushing aside Cassandra in the tiny hut to get to him.

Trevelyan didn’t answer. The mark hissed and sparked in his palm as if the thin barrier that had protected the bones of poor dead Telana had shot into it.

“It’s possible,” Trevelyan gritted out as he rose, “—that the barrier’s energy was drawn into the mark.” He shook out his hand and clacked his fingers together. “It feels different.”

“How different?” Iron Bull's face was pouring sweat. The strange, alternating chill and humidity of the Frostbacks had not favored him. He also had not stopped twitching since they got off the boat, his eyes widening each time a spirit floated across his path.

“I’m not sure yet…..it’s like when Corypheus surged energy into it at Haven. The Anchor feels more awake now.”

“We can worry about that later.” Cassandra’s sword rang out of its scabbard. “We’ve been followed.”

They followed her gaze to see a boatful of Hakkonites trekking across the tidal marsh toward them. Their magicked weapons gleamed in the sunset light.

"Well then." Trevelyan rolled his neck and unstrapped his staff from his back. "Let's make sure our bones don't end up here, too."

 

* * *

 

As it turned out, they needn't have worried. As they cut through the Hakkonites—Dorian and Trevelyan firing from the ridge while Cassandra and Bull tore through them on the marsh—the mark spoke for itself. Trevelyan drew mana to cast barrier, and instead, as if from a muscle memory not his own, he lifted his hand and did a motion he had never seen before, drawing magic down in a spiral. There was a sound like a dropped coin, a whorl of energy, and a green barrier swirled around both himself and Dorian. A Hakkonite arrow squealed through the air, struck it, and then bounced back and speared the offending archer right through the eye.

Trevelyan laughed as green fire licked from his palm. “Thank you, Telana!”

Dorian did not laugh.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t until their party was safely back at the Inquisition's camp that Trevelyan noticed something was wrong. Dorian hadn't spoken since the battle. They tended their gear in silence together inside his tent before he finally cleared his throat. 

“You’ve been quiet since the island,” said Trevelyan softly. The camp was asleep, but like any camp, it had ears. He set his staff down beside his cot and began to unbuckle his armor.

“Between the mosquitoes, the mythical bogfishers, and the fanatical natives, whatever could I have to talk about?” Dorian slid a whetstone harder than necessary down his staff blade. 

Trevelyan had been with Dorian long enough to recognize this game. Pride was the Tevinter's least flattering quality, and getting him to talk about what was bothering him was like coaxing a surly cat off a high shelf.

“You were the one who begged to come here,” said Trevelyan. He shed his duster and sweat-stained tunic. “’How did you put it: One last hurrah before sailing back to Minrathous?’”

Dorian's jaw clenched. 

“If you’re unhappy, I can order the scouts to fan you with palm leaves, maybe massage your feet? It would be no trouble to arrange for you to stay behind tomorrow if that's what you want.”

“You would, you bastard.” Dorian threw down his staff. It clattered in the dirt. “Just to spite me.”

“If you’re going to act this way, Dorian, then sure.” Trevelyan sat down on his cot. His back ached wickedly, and he grimaced with the need to lie down. “What’s the matter? Don’t tell me this still bothers you?” He lifted his left hand. “It saved me a hole in the head this afternoon.”

“Yes, by all means, give thanks to the poor woman who died alone a thousand years ago, likely mad with sepsis, for her contribution to the ripple effect of history. Wake up Kenric, he might even get a paper out of it!”

Trevelyan blinked at him in the lantern light. “You’re angry about Telana?”

“Now _that_ would be pointless. Although, so long as we’re on the subject of history, might discuss the fact that we're hurtling toward the same end that killed your predecessor?”

“Finding out what happened to him is why we came here in the first place. We can't abandon the mission." 

“I’m sure Ameridan said the same thing.” Dorian unclasped his cloak, and, with typical flair, tossed it over a chair and threw himself onto his cot. He lay there, not sleeping, until Trevelyan sighed and blew out the lantern.

It wasn’t hard to connect the dots; they’d been together long enough that Trevelyan knew intimately the snide, irritating games that made up Dorian’s defenses. His anger was born of worry....and insecurity.

It was something they’d avoided discussing ever since they’d been together—the reality that Dorian would never come first. Trevelyan, out of duty, would always choose the Inquisition over him. Even if it meant his death. Even if it meant leaving his lover alone in the world. 

In the riot of crickets and howler monkeys, Trevelyan lay awake. All he could see, over and over, was the tiny hut on the island, where they stood over the bones of a woman who had died in pain, forever waiting, a spirit crying out in her stead for a thousand years.

_Beloved. Inquisitor._

Trevelyan sighed and pushed back his blanket. He crawled across the tent and knelt by Dorian's side. "Do you want us to go home?" 

"Of course I do," said Dorian. 

"But if I told everyone tomorrow, 'pack up, we're returning to Skyhold....'"

"And what, abandon the adventure for the domesticity of your castle? Do you take me for a coward?"

"Then what do you want?"

"I want for you to be-!" Dorian inhaled.

"Careful?"

After a long moment, Dorian scooted over. Trevelyan slid in beside him. Their left hands found each other in the dark and clasped tightly, the Anchor pulsing hard between their palms.

"You're not Telana," whispered Trevelyan. "And I'm not Ameridan."

Dorian said nothing.

"I can't promise nothing will happen the farther we go. I can't even promise that the same thing that befell them won't befall us. But even if the worst happens, I don't regret being here with you." He kissed the back of Dorian's neck. "I don't think they regretted it either."

Dorian sighed. His thumb traced the green line of the mark. "Please tell me you'd never tuck tail and run just because I asked you to." 

"Of course not."

"Good. You'd be a terrible Inquisitor if you did."

Trevelyan closed his eyes at that. He wasn't sure what kind of Inquisitor he was, or even what kind Ameridan had been. He only hoped that a thousand years from now, the historians could say that the Herald and his companions survived their adventure together, and that the story didn't end here: with a lover weeping alone down the centuries, waiting for his beloved to return. 


	17. Afternoon (Male Trevelyan/Dorian Pavus)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shameless smut.
> 
> nsfw

Dorian squeezed his eyes shut. It was hard to care much about Corypheus and the potential destruction of the free world when the Inquisitor’s hand was wrapped around his cock and Trevelyan was gazing down at him in the warmth of his enormous bed.

“I hope you know I have a meeting in ten minutes,” said Trevelyan.

“Then you’ll just….have to get on with it….” Dorian gripped the sheets. He was on his back, legs spread obscenely with the Inquisitor kneeling between them. He desperately wanted the man to stick _something_ back in him, but he wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of saying so.

Trevelyan, in his devious way, went on stroking him slowly, his free hand toying with Dorian’s balls. “I could keep them waiting. It’s not as if they haven’t figured out why I'm always wandering into the war room with my shirts half-laced.”

“Terribly rude of you….” Dorian whined and threw back his head. The muscles were tightening low in his belly, making him squirm. “I won’t beg, you bastard.”

“That’s a pity.” Trevelyan slowed down his hand even more.

“ _Kaffas._ Please,” Dorian rasped.

“Hmmm?” Trevelyan brushed a knuckle from root to tip.

“Stick your Maker-damned fingers in my ass before I hex your eyebrows off!”

“There he is.” Trevelyan let go of his balls and slid his hand lower. His middle and ring fingers slipped in easily, his other hand still jerking as he began pressing tenderly, insistently, on that spot.

In another life, Dorian would have been ashamed of the noise he made when he came. His whole body convulsed with it, a pulse that raised his hips and back off the mattress and made him buck into Trevelyan’s hand. He came and came harder and harder until it covered his chest and throat and face. Trevelyan quickly released his cock and covered Dorian’s eyes with his warm, musky palm, and the gesture was so sweet, so innocent, that it completely undid him. Dorian sobbed and gripped the Inquisitor’s arm, digging his nails into the flesh, as he shuddered and whimpered and wailed through the aftershock. When it was over, everything hurt, and he didn’t think he could have lowered his trembling legs if he tried.

“Record distance.” Trevelyan removed his hand and leaned down until they were pressed together. His expression was entirely too syrupy. “You’re a mess.”

“And Josephine is going to flay you alive,” Dorian panted, trying to return some dignity to himself. He was embarrassed by his body’s reaction, though admittedly less so than he would have been a few months ago. He let his ankles cross lazily behind Trevelyan’s back, drawing him in. “Weren’t you the one telling me that the Inquisition has to come first in all things?”

“Only on days when you don’t come first,” said Trevelyan, and lowered his face for a kiss. Their soft and spent bodies fit together in a way that made Dorian want nothing more than to keep this man to himself until the entire Inquisition was banging on the door demanding his release, but, alas, saving the world and all that.

He turned his head against Trevelyan’s sweat-damp brow. “Run along and play.”

“I’ll be back later. Presumably.” Trevelyan rolled to the side of the bed. “It depends on how much paperwork I’ll have to do in penance. Feel free to sleep in.”

“I have every intention to.” Doubtful. He’d be bored and restless within the hour and wandering back to his library alcove to research. As much as he appreciated the gesture, lounging around like a kept man didn’t really suit him. “Be a dear and hand me a cloth.”

Trevelyan tossed him one from the washbasin in the corner and preceded to clean himself. 

“Time face the hordes of darkness,” said Trevelyan, after he was dressed, though admittedly still reeking of sex. He leaned over the bed to give Dorian one last nuzzle. “Bureaucratically.”

“I’ll be here, lovely and lonely as ever.”

Their noses brushed together, and then Trevelyan, eyes smiling, went down the stairs and was gone. Dorian lay in bed for a time, letting his muscles relax and the heat seep out of his skin. The windowpanes rattled in their frame against a high wind, and the fire in the chimney flattened. Eventually, he sat up and took in the stacks of paperwork and books strewn across the Inquisitor’s desk. It would be days, if not weeks before they could steal away another afternoon alone like this.

He rolled onto his side and inhaled deep Trevelyan's scent with a frown.

Maybe he would reconsider that nap after all.


	18. Erosion (Male Hawke/Fenris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kirkwall has terrible pH levels.

It was the rain that woke him.

Fenris opened his eyes. The double doors that led from his bedroom to the garden patio were open. A damp breeze was ruffling the pages of the books on his desk and tapping stray droplets of rain onto the tile floor inside.  

He swept a hand across the mattress beside him and found it still warm. 

"Right here," called Hawke.

Fenris turned his head. Hawke was out in the garden, taking a bath in the rain. 

He watched openly. He had seen no end of naked flesh in his life: slaves at the _thermae_ , whores hanging out windows vying their wares, sailors swimming in the blood-warm waters of Minrathous bay....but every time he caught sight of Hawke's body it scattered all thought from his mind. He took in the long, hard lines of his back, the dark hair on his chest, the muscles of his arms tensing as he washed the skin of his neck, until watching wasn't enough, and he got out of bed and stepped out beneath the overhang.

Hawke turned at the sound of his footsteps and grinned.

"Do they not teach Fereldens to step in out of the rain?" asked Fenris, folding his arms.

"We stink like horses," said Hawke. "Or maybe actors, I can never remember the saying. Come on, it's warm!"

Fenris huffed and stepped out into the drizzle. As he passed a puddle, he kicked a foot through it and sprayed Hawke with water that was shockingly colder than the rain. Hawke shrieked and danced away, and Fenris chuckled. His triumph lasted only a second before Hawke grabbed his arm and yanked him against his chest. A swell of warmth twisted through both of them, and they came together in a kiss at the same time.

It was indulgent kissing in the rain like this, without fear of who might come through the door and find them this way. Some small atrophied limb of fear twinged in the back of his mind-- _an assassin could creep in, their armor and blades were on the floor_ \--before the rain washed it away, and it faded into a dull ache.

Hawke moved them against a marble pillar. He leaned back against the cold stone, and Fenris let himself be turned so that they could look out over the garden together, Hawke's warm arms around his shoulders. 

Fenris sighed and lifted his gaze to the waterstained lines on the outside of his neglected mansion.

"The rain does that in Minrathous, too," he murmured.

"Oh?" Hawke did not follow his gaze, only held him tighter.

"It tastes of rust, and smoke, and kills the plants in some places. Over time, it even destroys the faces of statues. On hot days, the very air hurts to breathe."

"Sounds like a terrible place to live."

"It was," said Fenris.

"Is the rain in Kirkwall as bad?" asked Hawke.

Fenris stuck his tongue out and then spat on the ground.

"No," he said, running a hand through the damp hair of Hawke's arm, as their hearts beat toward a single thrum. "There's no comparison."


	19. Oasis (Male Trevelyan/Dorian Pavus)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bull bites off more than he can chew.

“Hmmm. Quite the stink eye you’ve got going, Dorian." 

In truth, Dorian had been squinting at the horizon rippling at the edge of the Forbidden Oasis, but he indulged the Iron Bull by turning his attention on him.

"And how exactly would you prefer me to look while we comb this charming wasteland for ocularum shards?" he said. The air was so dry it hurt to breathe. "Meditative? Enlightened? Browned by the sun in a batter of snake venom with a garnish of ennui?"

"Only if you're trussed." Bull scratched his stubbled jaw, leaning on his ax under the lone thorn tree on the desert plateau where the party was currently resting. "Though, I'd prefer to see you battered with-" 

"My dear, kindly nip that thought in the bud." Vivienne was seated on a crate beside him in the shade of the tree. She fanned herself with a palm frond. "We've heard quite enough of them today."

"Agreed," said Solas beside the ocularum, marking locations on the map as Trevelyan muttered them to him. The top of his bald head was red and peeling. 

"Yes, ma'am," said Bull. "Sorry." 

Dorian allowed himself a relieved sigh. He was momentarily tempted to go stand with them in the shade, but doing so would give the impression that, despite his protestations, he actually _wanted_ to stand next to the Iron Bull. So instead he wilted in the blaring sun, his head throbbing with thirst and misery.

None of this would be a problem if the Bull would simply take a hint. For a man who never failed to remind everyone within earshot of his Ben-Hassrath training, he was exasperatingly dense on this point. On and on with the insinuations, the constant little jabs that "the Tevinter mage doth protest too much," all while humiliation burned under Dorian’s skin and he wished he could set the man's circus pants on fire. No matter how Dorian puffed, protested, and sneered, there the Bull was, waggling his eyebrows as if this was all a tiresome dance that would inevitably end with them in bed. 

Smug and malodorous. What an enticing combination.  

And, as if on cue, a large, horned shadow fell across him. 

"You're still looking," said Bull lightly.

Dorian gritted his teeth. "If someone's great Qunari ass wasn't taking up half the view, I wouldn't have to."

"Oh, so you _do_ think it's a great ass?" Bull laughed. 

Dorian felt his blood boil. He was vaguely aware of Trevelyan's shoulders tensing beneath his tunic.

"You stand there, flexing your muscles, huffing like some beast of burden, with no thought save conquest,” said Dorian.

“That’s right,” said Bull. His lip curled up to reveal a sharp canine. “These big, muscled hands could tear those robes right off while you struggled, helpless in my grip. I’d pin you down, and as you gripped my horns, _I would conquer you_.”

A dry wind hissed sand across the plateau. Trevelyan lifted his head from the ocularum and Solas glanced up from his map. Vivienne had stopped fanning.

"Uh...." Dorian blinked. "What?" 

"Oh. Is that not where we're going?" Bull rubbed his neck uneasily. 

Dorian felt cold nausea rise up under his throat that had nothing to do with the sun. He flushed, pushed beyond all patience, and opened his mouth to say—

“Wait, you’re actually serious?” Trevelyan let go of the ocularum and turned around. 

“Why not?” Bull regained his composure and folded his arms. “Last I checked, it's got nothing to do with you.”

“Maker’s breath, you’ve never had sex with a mage before have you?” said Trevelyan. 

A flicker of doubt crossed over the Qunari’s features. “Ah....no? Why?”

Trevelyan looked beseechingly to his fellow mages. Vivienne was already on her feet and Solas folded the map behind his back. "He doesn't know."

“Know what?” said Bull.

“About the demons.”

The shift in the Qunari’s features was subtle, but he might as well have been pricked with a needle. “Demons, boss?”

“Why did you think mages were first put in the Circle to begin with, my dear?” said Vivienne.

“Because….magic is dangerous?” Bull, the Ben-Hassrath spy who knew everything about everybody, didn’t know a flea's rump about the Fade, that much was clear. As was his growing discomfort.

“A mage who engages in coitus may inevitably draw a demon of desire into their flesh,” said Solas, squinting against the sun. “It is unavoidable, and tragically, one of the greatest dangers of magic. To lie with a mage is to risk not only possession of the mage but the possession of the partner through bodily fluids.”

“In short," said Trevelyan, "demon-possessed cum. It's rare, but it does happen. You really had no idea.”

Bull’s eye swept over the three of them—from Trevelyan, to Solas, to Vivienne. “You’re shitting me.”

Vivienne covered her mouth with her frond. Solas merely shook his head.

Bull stepped back as if he was seeing them clearly for the first time. “The Qunari—”

“Ignorance of magic is its own power, especially for those who are fearful of it,” said Solas. “Can you honestly think of anyone who has lain with a saarebas?”

“So, you mean….” Bull spared a look at Dorian. They were all staring at Dorian now--one baffled, three stoic and waiting.

Dorian thought of the last few months. Of the constant needling and flirtations and his own confusion that felt nothing like happiness and everything like being controlled. He thought about how his own words seemed to count as little more than a game when speaking with the Qunari.

He looked at Bull, who a moment ago had seemed so vexing and now seemed only foolish. 

“You’ve been playing with fire,” said Dorian flatly.  

“I’ll be more careful, then,” said Bull in a woozy voice.

Solas clapped him on the shoulder. “Do you need a moment?”

“I think I do. I’ll….go pick up that first shard." He took the offered map. "Be back soon.”

They watched the dazed Qunari wander down the plateau path. He grew smaller as he descended into the shadow of the canyon.

“Three…..two….one….” muttered Trevelyan.

As soon as he was out of earshot, all four of them fell into a howling mess.

“Maker, I can’t believe I kept a straight face.” Dorian stomach actually hurt from laughter. “I almost feel guilty for not saying something.”

“I believe he’s the one currently feeling guilty for saying _something_ , my dear,” said Vivienne, no longer guarding her smile.

“Even if he isn't, he'll tread more carefully in the future,” said Solas.

Trevelyan was the first to stop laughing. “He had better.”

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t until later when Dorian and the Inquisitor were bathing in the icy waters of the moonlight pool beneath camp, that Dorian asked in all seriousness, “You really don’t care for him, do you?”

Trevelyan’s dug a handful of sand from the bottom of the oasis and used it to scrub the dust and sweat from his skin. “No. And I hate the way he talks to you. And to Cassandra for that matter.”

"A due intervention, then," said Dorian, with a fluttering in his chest. "You'd think he'd have figured us out by now." 

“He thinks he knows people,” Trevelyan opened his hands underwater, watching the sand cloud. “But he understands less than he thinks. Let him stew. I’ll consider it revenge for that shit he said back in Redcliffe about the Tranquil.”

Dorian, not able to help himself, pressed his lips to the line of sunburn on the back of Trevelyan's neck. “Remind me to never get on your bad side.”

“Trust me,” chuckled Trevelyan. “You’d know if you did.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a scene from a longer story that has since become unrecognizable. I enjoyed the idea of a four mage party enough that I decided to post it here.


	20. Protagonist (Male Trevelyan/Dorian Pavus)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A moment of reflection during the events of Trespasser.

The Anchor roared, and Dorian caught Trevelyan before he could crash face-first into the ground.

“We need to stop,” he called ahead to Sera and Bull. The strange air of the Crossroads echoed and distorted his voice, as they were inside a vaulted chantry instead of on a floating rock in the middle of nowhere.

“No….” Trevelyan’s hand smeared sweat on a marble pillar as he gripped a chain of ivy and yanked himself up. His face was white as whey under his hood. “There’s no time, we’ve got to get to the Darvaarad—“

“Your wrist is swollen.” Bull's eye was soft as he approached. He pointed to the skin turning raw around the hungry green veins consuming Trevelyan’s left hand. “Let’s cut that glove off you, it’ll give you better mobility.”

Trevelyan was nothing if not a pragmatist, and he hesitated. Dorian, for once, was grateful for Bull's strategic kindness. 

“I’ll do it,” said Dorian. “You two, go watch the far eluvian and make sure none of our horned friends come through.”

“But what about—hey!” Bull grabbed Sera by the arm and dragged her to the big mirror further down the path. Once they were out of sight, Dorian unsheathed his knife and began cutting through the boiled leather of Trevelyan’s gauntlet.

“Dorian…..” Trevelyan’s voice was faint.

“Hush now.” It was hard to concentrate as Dorian worked the knife. The flesh underneath it was boiling, bubbling, dying.

“Indulge me.” Trevelyan pushed back his hood with his free hand. The dark circles under his eyes that Dorian had attributed to the stress of the Council had taken a sickly, oily sheen.

 _How, how did he keep it from me?_ Dorian thought. 

_Because you weren’t here, Dorian Pavus. Because you’re not going to be here in a few days either, if you survive._

_You won’t be here to put him on the pyre._

“You must have swallowed a stone, from the face you just made.” Trevelyan hissed in pain, then relief, as his sleeve and gauntlet came away. “Want to hear what I’ve been thinking?”

“Hopefully, it’s a way to smack that potted plant atrocity off Arl Teagan’s head. Honestly, orange and gold in autumn? Fereldens.”

Silence. Dorian lifted his eyes, and saw, with a thrill of horror, the calm that had settled over Trevelyan's face.

It was the same look that Felix had gotten the day he set sail for Tevinter. The day when he clapped Dorian on the shoulder and gave him the first hug they had ever shared, and the last.

It was the look of a man who knew there was no return trip.

“I never really told you about the day of the Conclave, did I?" said Trevelyan. 

He swallowed drily, and Dorian uncorked his waterskin and handed it to him. Trevelyan’s throat bobbed as he drank, then drank again, as if it had not slaked his thirst at all.

“I went there all by myself. I was probably the only one who bothered to show up alone. Everyone else came in big groups. Chantry officials, apostates, Circle mages, Templars, and noble emissaries with their entourages full of children and servants setting up tents as big as towers…..”

Trevelyan flexed the fingers of his glowing hand.

“When I next woke up, I was in a cell. Cassandra took me up to the crater, and everywhere there were bodies. It was as if they’d been turned to ash, but were still burning inside. Their eyes were on fire, their hands were clutching at their mouths and throats. _Thousands_ of them.”

Dorian remained silent. By the time he’d arrived at Haven—Maker, a lifetime ago—the bodies had been cleared from the crater. In any case, he’d been more interested in the floating stones and magical anomalies in the area, and by the Breach itself. The battle with Corypheus had not given him much perspective on the area either.

“I could never wrap my mind around it," continued Trevelyan. "Out of all those thousands of people, only one survived, and that one was me. I kept trying to picture what it would have been like to be one of them. To have died at the Conclave. No one would have cared. My parents had disowned me years ago, and any friends I had in the Circle had been killed in the war. I would have been less than a name, unremembered.”

“But you didn’t die.” Dorian gripped his free hand.

Trevelyan’s eyes were far away. “The day of the Conclave....I’d wandered into the Temple of Sacred Ashes. There were a lot of parties milling about, groups convening, delegations….I just wanted to be left alone. I met an elf there, of all things, a Dalish hunter, who was poking through some of the old tomes kept in the temple archives. We ended up sneaking up a flight of stairs to have a drink on the landing. A few minutes later, I thought I heard someone yelling upstairs. He offered to go with me, but I told him to stay.“

Trevelyan unclenched his hand.

“Sometimes, in Skyhold, when I'm sitting on the throne in the great hall, watching over the nobles, the soldiers, the people assembled for me, and I feel _them_ there. This crowd of ghosts. The thousands that never made it out. And all the time, they’re looking at me, with one question in their eyes—when will it be your turn?”

“Amatus.” Dorian gripped this man, this man he loved, by the shoulders hard. There was no time, there was never enough time. “It’ll be all right, I promise. We can cut the arm off, we’ll figure something out.”

Trevelyan kissed him then. “I think my time’s up, love."

Dorian squeezed his eyes shut. For a moment, a vision of the future lashed through his mind like fire. The Inquisitor, _his_ Inquisitor, burning alive from the inside out. Green flames licked up his body, burst from his eyes, ate his flesh, lit his hair like a torch. His skin was hardening like sand beneath a lightning strike, and he fell to his knees, hands scratching at his face even as the fingers curled—

“No, none of this." Dorian rose to his feet. "Not one more word of, ‘I was supposed to die back there,’ or ‘it should have been that Dalish fellow.’ You don't get to pull this nonsense on me now.”

He yanked Trevelyan hard to his feet and shoved his staff back in his hand.

“You’re not turning into a crumbling black skeleton," said Dorian. "I’ll make sure of it.”

To his credit, the Inquisitor decided now was not the best time to argue. He simply nodded, gripped his staff with a wince, and ran off to lend the world his help—this time, not alone. 


End file.
